Peshawar, Pakistan – Pro-Taliban fighters seized an Islamic shrine in restive northwestern Pakistan and renamed it after the Red Mosque, where dozens of militants died this month in a showdown with government forces in the capital of Islamabad, officials said Monday.
The attack drove home the lack of government control in the tribal region, where a local government official said authorities were trying to negotiate the militants’ peaceful departure from the shrine.
Three soldiers and four civilians died in other violence in the northwest, where President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is under growing pressure from Washington to crack down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
U.S. officials have floated the possibility of unilateral military strikes in the tribal regions, a possibility that Pakistan once again strongly rejected.
“Pakistan will not allow any foreign forces to conduct activities inside its territory,” Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told legislators Monday, according to a government statement. “The integrity and sovereignty of the country will be protected at all cost, and no outside interference will be allowed.”
The government also criticized a bill that would tie development aid to Pakistan’s progress in fighting militancy.
About 70 pro-Taliban militants overran the shrine of renowned Pashtun freedom fighter Sahib Turangzai and its adjoining mosque in the Mohmand tribal region late Sunday, a militant representative said.
They evicted the mosque’s caretakers, renamed it and declared their support for Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the deputy cleric of the Red Mosque, who had spearheaded an increasingly aggressive, Taliban-style anti-vice campaign in the capital.
Pakistani troops finally cracked down on the mosque, and Ghazi was killed along with at least 101 other people after a week-long siege that ended July 12.
