Islamabad, Pakistan
By NBC News' Fakhar Rehman
UPPER DIR, Pakistan – "The noose around the Taliban is tightening," said 50-year-old Sirajuddin, the leader of a tribal militia based in Dhogbala, a town in the Upper Dir region of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. "Our fight will go on to the final victory."
Taliban militants have been pouring into Upper Dir for weeks, fleeing the Pakistan army assault in the adjacent Swat Valley. Sirajuddin, who goes by just one name, said that the army had been bombing the militants’ hideouts in the nearby hills and hit some shops in Dhogbala by mistake. The militants then swarmed down from the mountains, raided the shops and stole all the food.
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| Fakhar Rehman / NBC News |
| Sirajuddin, the leader of a tribal militia fighting the Taliban. |
Sirajuddin, tall and slim with a neatly cropped salt and pepper beard, spoke softly as he explained the militia’s determination to go after the Taliban. But his voice rose in anger and his lips quivered when he recalled the suicide attack by the Taliban on his mosque on June 5.
"Those criminals killed 40 innocent people at prayer, just because they would not support them. We had to bury 12 children that day," said Sirajuddin. "Tell me, what was their crime?"
The next day, after the funerals, 500 villagers gathered at the home of one of their elders and voted unanimously to avenge the deaths from the mosque bombing and go after the Taliban. Sirajuddin volunteered to give up his job as a laborer and lead the militia.
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By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
ISLAMABAD – Pakistanis want to hold President Barack Obama to his word.
"If he does what he says he is going to do, then it will be the beginning of a new era," said Raja Qamar, the cashier at the New Raja Restaurant in Islamabad.
In this simple lunch place in Islamabad on Thursday, a dozen or so diners seemed more interested in eating their lunch then watching the small TV suspended high on a corner wall. The ceiling fans creaked and groaned in a steady hum but were no match for the more than 100 degree heat outside.
When Obama came on the screen, the diners looked up and watched expressionless; most following the Urdu subtitles on the screen – no one stopped eating.
Nasir Mahmood, the restaurant’s only waiter, wiped the sweat from his brow with the same brown towel that he wiped the tables. His customers were coming and going – Obama’s speech was not enough of a draw to keep them inside. But as he took the lunch orders, Mahmood studied the TV.
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As the number of people fleeing fighting in Pakistan's northwestern Swat valley reaches nearly 2 million, the race to help those displaced by the worsening war may prove crucial in determining the outcome of the battle. NBC News' Ian Williams reports.
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By NBC News’ Mushtaq Yusufzai
MARDAN, Pakistan – Shaista, a terrified 11-year-old girl from the Swat Valley, was lying in a hospital bed in Mardan’s ill-equipped health center on Friday.
She suffered severe injuries to her legs when an artillery shell, reportedly fired by Pakistani troops, hit her family’s small house Thursday night in Mingora.
The traumatized Shaista said the mortar shell struck a room where she was sleeping. Her voice choking, Shaista said her mother, two sisters and brother were killed in the incident – and then she became lost in deep despair.
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| Mushtaq Yusufzai / NBC |
| Shaista, 11, in her hospital bed in Marden. |
A doctor treating the girl said she seems to lose her memory when speaking and starts to suddenly cry – apparently because of deep shock she suffered.
Children have proved to be some of the hardest-hit victims among the estimated one million people displaced by the ongoing fighting between Pakistan’s armed forces and Taliban militants in the northern districts of Buner and Swat.
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By NBC News’ Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai
ISLAMABAD – After weeks of consolidating their control over large areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, the Taliban are in retreat.
On Friday, Maulana Fazullah, the firebrand Taliban boss in the Swat Valley, ordered his most trusted military chief, Commander Fateh, to leave Buner, a neighboring valley that Fateh seized on Monday.
The Pakistani authorities warned the militants on Thursday that they were ready to remove them by force if they did not lay down their arms and abide by a peace agreement hammered out in February.
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| Mohammad Sajjad / AP |
| Taliban militants hold their weapons outside a mosque in Daggar, Buner's main town on Thursday. |
According to the deal, the government ceded power to the Taliban in the Swat Valley and allowed them to impose Islamic law in the area in return for a cease-fire – ending two years of on and off military operations there.
But last weekend at a large gathering of supporters in the valley, the Taliban announced they would not lay down their arms and openly challenged the state. They declared that democracy was un-Islamic and called for harsh Islamic laws, known as sharia, to replace Pakistan’s constitution.
The next day, they began their advance into Buner. That valley’s proximity to the capital, Islamabad, just 70 miles and a five-hour drive away, sounded alarm bells in Washington.
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By NBC News’ Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – "I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at al-Qaida and Taliban houses," confessed 19-year-old Habibur Rehman, just before the Taliban shot him dead for spying for the United States. "If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars," he said.
In a video released last week by the Taliban as a warning to other would-be spies, Rehman recounted how he was recruited to spy on the Taliban in North Waziristan and drop small transmitter chips on specific targets to call in CIA pilotless drone aircraft.
"I thought this was a very easy job," Rehman said in the video before he was killed. "The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money."
The chips transmit a signal to a satellite overhead. The drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, are controlled and remotely piloted by the CIA in the United States, according to Pakistani and western military analysts. Once the signal is received, the drone takes off from Shamsi air base in southwestern Pakistan and collects data and intelligence to attack the chosen Taliban and al-Qaida target.
A U.S. official, who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity about the Taliban allegation said, "People should recognize this for what it is … extremist propaganda."
President Barack Obama has stated that he considers the drone program an effective tool to target al-Qaida sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the mountainous border with Afghanistan. Nine out of 20 wanted al-Qaida operatives, who were on a list drawn up by U.S. official last year, have been killed by drones using intelligence provided from chips planted by Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen working as spies.
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By NBC News’ Mushtaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Afghan intelligence agents are sharing information with militants about U.S. and NATO troop movements, a top Taliban commander told NBC News.
"The people of Afghanistan are with us," said Sirajuddin Haqqani, in an exclusive interview. "The Afghan intelligence officials are sympathetic to the Taliban and they communicate the movements of the occupying forces [U.S. and NATO] to us."
There was no way to confirm Haqqani's claims, but nearly eight years after the attacks of 9/11, the United States has struggled to oust the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies from parts of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
On March 27, President Barack Obama pledged a fresh infusion of U.S. troops to the region. "If the Afghanistan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged," Obama said, "that country will again be a base for terrorists."
The United States also has hinted at possible negotiations with some elements of the Taliban. On March 31, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Taliban members in Afghanistan who abandoned extremism must be granted an "honorable form of reconciliation" while Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted that a similar rapprochement worked in Iraq.
However, the Taliban commander – who has a $5 million bounty on his head – dismissed U.S. efforts. Haqqani said that, contrary to comments from U.S. officials, there are no moderate Taliban willing to talk to America. As for other negotiations, Haqqani said that rumors of Saudi Arabia brokering peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership were just that – rumors.
Haqqani said Taliban fighters are now more resourceful than in the past. "We have acquired the modern technology that we were lacking and we have mastered new and innovative methods of making bombs and explosives," he explained.
The commander said he travels freely around Afghanistan because most people don’t know what he looks like. The 29-year-old said he keeps a low profile by travelling alone or just with one companion.
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By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
ISLAMABAD – Perhaps the $5 million bounty recently put on him by the United States has gone to his head.
Baitullah Mehsud, the notoriously reclusive chief of the Pakistani Taliban, suddenly thrust himself into the media spotlight last week by telephoning local journalists to claim responsibility for a recent series of brazen terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
And then came another surprise (this one fantastical): On Saturday he called back to brag that he was behind the attack on an immigration center by a lone Vietnamese gunman in Binghamton, N.Y., saying that the attacks were in revenge for the ongoing missile strikes on Pakistan’s tribal areas by unmanned United States drone aircraft.
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| EPA file |
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Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud (left with brown cap) speaks to journalists in South-Waziristan in a file photo from May 2008. |
But information coming out of the tribal areas and from intelligence officials in Islamabad suggests that Mehsud’s bravado might just be his way of jockeying for power among the various militant groups seeking sanctuary along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It seems that Mehsud, who has recently deepened his ties with al-Qaida, is trying to assert himself as commander in chief of the entire jihadist network in Pakistan.
"There is an internal power struggle going on now," explained a former ISI station chief in Peshawar who spoke on condition of anonymity. "When [Mehsud] thinks that someone new is coming up and could overshadow him, he kills him," said the official.
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By NBC News Shahid Qazi and Carol Grisanti
QUETTA, Pakistan – The 11-year-old girl blushed as she walked into the car dealer’s showroom on Quetta’s Adalat Road in southwest Pakistan. Her 17-year-old cousin, eyes fixed to the ground, followed her. When the younger girl asked the owner for five rupees (6 cents), he pointed to the back room and told both girls to follow him.
A stocky man in his mid-forties with sallow skin and puffy eyes, he told the girls to lift their shirts – he wanted to see. "Very nice," the owner said. "They are getting bigger," he told the 17-year-old as he touched her.
The 11-year-old was excited as she told us the story; we had followed them inside the showroom pretending to be customers interested in renting one of the Land Cruisers parked inside. The owner had given them 10 rupees (12 cents), the girls told us, more money than they had asked for. Then, giggling, they ran away.
It’s dangerous to be seen following these girls – some of their clients are wealthy feudal land barons and powerful politicians, others are ordinary shopkeepers who will give money to the poor, but want to get something in return.
The girls are part of an alarming problem that gets little attention in Pakistan.
"Prostitution is rampant in all the big cities throughout the country," said Senior Superintendent of Police, Raja Shahid, who heads the police investigation unit in Rawalpindi, a city close to the capital Islamabad.
"There are loopholes in the laws that need to be changed. For example, in order to nab the culprits, we need to conduct a raid – but we cannot conduct a raid without permission from a magistrate. By the time we get the permission we have missed our chance," he said.
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By NBC News Mushtaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – "I am Khadija Abdul Qahaar. I am a convert to Islam. I have been advised to make this video. I am going to be killed at anytime." So began a chilling video released on Wednesday by Taliban militants who are holding Qahaar, a Canadian woman, hostage somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Qahaar, whose former name is Beverly Giesbrecht, converted to Islam after 9/11. A 55-year-old journalist from Vancouver, she tried to travel into North Waziristan – one of the most dangerous areas in the world – last November with two Pakistani reporting assistants.
She wanted to interview survivors of the first ever U.S. drone attack in Bannu, a town in the Northwest Frontier Province, and then travel on to Miranshah, the main city of North Waziristan.
But Taliban militants, who patrol the Bannu-Miranshah road, intercepted Qahaar's taxi and dragged her and her two Pakistani companions out of their vehicle at gunpoint.
The video released Wednesday shows Qahaar sitting in a dark room with a dagger pointing at her as she makes a desperate plea for help.
"The time is very short now and my life is going to end, so I need someone to help me – either the Pakistani government or my own country. I want to go home," she said.
She pointed to the dagger and said that the Taliban were likely to behead her – as they did to Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak in February – if a ransom of $2 million was not paid by the end of March.
"These people are serious. Please help me," she said.
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