Red Mosque siege survivor speaks
Posted: Friday, August 03, 2007 7:21 AM
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Islamabad, Pakistan
By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
Habiba Aslam surprised me.
I expected her to cry, or at least show some emotion, as she recalled the ordeal she went through when Pakistani commandos stormed Islamabad’s Red Mosque compound three weeks ago.
"I saw some of my classmates die before my eyes," Aslam, a 20-year-old student at the Red Mosque madrassah (religious school), told me matter-of -factly.
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| Carol Grisanti / NBC News |
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Habiba Aslam, a survivor of the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad, Pakistan. |
"We saved ourselves with our burqas (head to toe garment) by wetting the cloth and breathing into it. The tear gas was so intense, the smoke from fires was suffocating and the gunfire so deafening, we all thought we would die."
At the beginning of July, the Red Mosque, a well-known center for radical Islamic teaching and it’s adjoining girls’ religious school, housing several thousand students, was stormed by Pakistan army special forces after a six month standoff between the government and the Islamic extremists inside the compound.
The mosque’s clerics had provoked and embarrassed the government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf by calling for jihad against his government, and attempting to establish Taliban-style laws in the country’s capital.
Intense attack
Alsam explained how the siege began: "At 11:30 a.m., we were studying when suddenly from the windows we saw security forces erecting barbed wire all around our buildings." As she spoke, only her orange painted fingernails were visible from under the concealing black layers of clothing covering her entire body.
"Then the security forces started shelling us with tear gas and shooting at us. Two of my friends were martyred that morning. They were shot in their backs."
"Why didn’t you leave after that?" I asked. "The security forces were begging all of you to leave before they stormed the building. What about your family? Did they not come for you?"
The black burqa covered most of Aslam’s eyes. I searched for some expression, but couldn’t find any. I focused on her bright orange nails.
"My father came," she said. "He told me he wouldn’t leave the place until he took me with him. Those were the last words he spoke to me," she said. "He has been missing ever since – I am sure he was either martyred or arrested."
The government had erected tents for all the parents who had come for news of their children and to take them home. Aslam’s father, an electrician at the Islamabad National Institute of Health, had come to find her.
Defiant resistance
Since the siege, Aslam is now back in her parents’ small, bare, four-room apartment in Islamabad living with her seven siblings. The living room where we met was sparsely furnished – it consisted of two single beds and a chair pushed against a wall, with a small plain wooden table in the middle of the room. The green paint had long chipped off the concrete walls; there were only hints of it left. No pictures or decorations were hanging and no traditional carpets adorned the naked stone floor.
I sat on one of the beds covered with a black and white moth-eaten fabric. Aslam and her 18-year-old brother sat across from me on the other bed. The broiling July sun streamed relentlessly thru the one window. The ceiling fan creaked and groaned, but was no match for the sizzling heat.
"I shared my room [at the madrassah] with 10 other girls" Aslam told me. "The firing was so intense during those eight days of the siege, we couldn’t leave our room."
I asked her how she survived the assault. "The army cut off our electricity, water and gas," she said. "The first couple of days, we burned our desks to cook rice and potatoes, then the food ran out. We survived by eating leaves."
"I never cried, not even once," she said almost defiantly. "We were fighting for the protection of our madrassah. It was our home and we were fighting to protect our home."
"When the security forces sprinkled gasoline around the outside of our rooms, they gave us half an hour to come out or die from the flames. No one obeyed their warning, but more than 40 of my friends died in the fires. They suffocated to death."
Nearly expressionless
I kept wondering how Aslam really felt about the ordeal, but she was inaccessible – her screen of black clothing divided us. She was expressionless; so was I.
"You see," she said, raising her voice just a little to make sure I understood, "after the security forces started those fires, there was thunder and lightning, followed by very heavy rains, which extinguished the fires around my room. Allah had willed I should live. I had wished martyrdom, but Allah had saved me to continue the struggle."
Aslam said she was often confused during the eight-day siege of the Red Mosque compound. At times, she thought it was all a very bad dream from which she would wake. Other times, she felt she had already died and was looking back on her previous life.
I asked her if I could meet her mother. She took me into another room where her mother was cooking over a burning stove. Then a surprise – Aslam lifted her veil and smiled at me.
She had a plain but pleasant face with patches of adolescent pimples. She seemed so vulnerable without her burqa shield.
"He who is afraid of death, death chases him," she said, her eyes soft and glistening. "He who isn’t afraid, death runs from him."
