Following last week's deadly bomb blasts in the Pakistani cities of Islamabad and Peshawar, well-placed sources in the capital told Adnkronos International (AKI) that president General Pervez Musharraf asked the Pakistani Air Force to carry out an air strike on the largest Islamic seminary or madrassa in Islamabad where two of leading ideologues of the Pakistani Taliban, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, are holed up after attempts to flush them out turned into a fiasco.
Pakistan conducted an air strike on a suspected militant training camp in South Waziristan on 16 January - after intense US pressure - putting an end to a peace deal between the two Waziristans and the Pakistani government. The revenge promised by local pro-Taliban militants came quickly, with an apparent sucide attack on 22 January in North Waziristan, killing at least three members of Pakistan's security forces.
The clerics who appear to have riled president Musharraf, are brothers Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, the sons of the slain Maulana Abdullah, one of the oligarchs of the resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Both are controversial religious figures and there have been direct requests from Washington and London for their arrests. They are both wanted by Pakistan's interior ministry and cannot leave the premises of the Lal Masjid, the central mosque in Islamabad, as there are warrants for their arrest.
However Pakistani security agencies' efforts to arrest them on a number of occasion have failed - in part because of resistance within the political establishment and of fear of the popular reaction in Islamabad and beyond.
This time though, sources told AKI that Musharraf reportedly told a gathering of senior officials at a meeting in Rawalpindi: "I don’t want them in federal capital. If you are unable to arrest them…shoot them."
Those attending reportedly disagreed categorically with the idea of an air strike in the capital city, and pointed out that the students of the influential clerics have already staged a powerful protest in the past few days against the demolition of two mosques in Islamabad and they are a force to be reckoned with.
"Yes, I confirm that we have received direct threats from high-level authorities within the military establishment that General Pervez Musharraf is personally very disgruntled with our seminaries in the federal capital and since the authorities failed to take any action against us…he wants to kill us both," said Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, in a telephone interview with Adnkronos International (AKI) from Islamabad.
Soon after 7 July 2005 bomb blasts on the London transport system which killed 56 people, Pakistani security forces carried out a massive crackdown on madrassas including those in Islamabad run by Maulana Abdul Aziz and Maulana Ghazi Abdul Rasheed.
However the female students at the seminary for girls not only resisted the crackdown but the entire operation also turned out to be very embarrassing for the Pakistani government. Many female students were seriously injured by policemen and several police officers were wounded by the girls.
The authorities opted to avoid a direct clash with those running the seminaries. However, Pakistan's interior ministry issued a warrant for the arrest of both brothers who were then forced to take refuge inside the seminary and the mosque.
Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz first made headlines when they issued a religious decree in 2004 against Pakistani armed forces personnel fighting against al-Qaeda militants in South Waziristan. The decree stated that Pakistani soldiers fighting South Waziristan did not deserve a Muslim funeral or burial at Muslim cemeteries in the event that they were killed while fighting in the tribal region which lies on the Pakistan-Afghan border.
The religious decree was well-received in extremist circles and 500 other religious scholars signed the edict. The decree turned out to be a major reason why many officers and soldiers in the Pakistani army refused to fight militants in Waziristan.
"We trust in Allah. We always abide by the law," Abdul Rasheed told AKI. "We will not retaliate even though we know the designs of General Pervez Musharraf.
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