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PESHAWAR, Oct 16: Anger in Pakistan’s tribal belt has fuelled a recruitment drive of thousands of young men eager to fight a Jihad if US troops invade Afghanistan, tribal sources say.
They say Islamic religios parties, kept on a tight leash elsewhere in Pakistan, are openly running pro-Taliban recruitment and donation drives along the edge of the North-West Frontier Province, where tribesmen claim special links with fellow Pashtun tribes across the border.
Tribe members say Mulla Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the Taliban movement ruling Afghanistan, has asked them not to enter the country until Washington — which is now bombing Taliban targets daily —sends in ground forces in its “war on terror.”
The big question now is: how many of these cheering untrained “jihadis” will actually fight and what difference they can make when faced with crack Western commando teams, backed by the world’s only superpower?
“They’re willing to go and fight. When Mulla Omar calls, they will be ready,” said Sabir Afridi, a trader in a smugglers’ market and member of the Afridi tribe, the largest in Pakistan’s Khyber Pass area.
“ Ninety per cent of the people signing up are Afghan refugees anyway”, said Wilayat Afridi, a local representative of the Pakistan People’s Party. “They’re mostly uneducated people manipulated by the religious parties.”
Nobody knows how many men may have signed up, but the movement appears to have won thousands, perhaps a few tens of thousands, of signatories.
“ At least 5,000 have signed up in the Khyber Agency alone and another 3,000 in Mohmand,” said Rehmat Gul Afridi, a journalist specialising in the tribal belt.
Recruiting was considerably stronger in North and South Waziristan, two of the seven agencies or districts in the poverty-stricken tribal belt where about five million Pakistani Pashtun live. Foreigners are barred from entering the tribal belt for reasons of security.
Leading the recruiting drive is the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, whose leader, Fazlur Rehman, was put under house arrest early in October to halt the pro-Taliban rallies he was holding.
Another leading religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, and some hardline Sunni groups, have also been sponsoring rallies and opening recruitment offices.
Donations are also accepted. In Bajaur Agency, north of Peshawar, recruiters said they had recently collected three million rupees, 40 kg of gold and jewellery and four truckloads of sheep and goats for the Afghan cause.
TALIBAN AND TRIBES: Saddar Khan Seerat, a Pashtun journalist from the Khyber Pass who has worked on both sides of the border, said the tribal belt volunteers were mostly refugees who would go and fight for their homeland.
“They’re not friends of the Taliban, but they are against the United States because it is attacking them,” he said.
“ Many of the men in refugee camps in Pakistan have already left. They think that the United States will fall apart just like the Soviet Union fell apart after losing its war in Afghanistan.”
Ali Akbar Afridi, a tribal belt cloth merchant and representative of the Pakistan Muslim League party, said Pakistani Pashtun were unlikely to rally to the Taliban.
“No Pakistani tribals will go, even if they say at these rallies that they will,” he said. “They’ll only go if they’re offered money.”
But the Taliban have been surprisingly stingy with their fellow Pashtun in Pakistan, in contrast to earlier Kabul governments that lavished funds and arms on the tribesmen in an attempt to win their support.
“Babrak Karmal gave every tribesman who came to Kabul a Kalashnikov and 30,000 rupees and they reciprocated by making it hard for the Mujahideen to cross through their areas,” he said.
Karmal was Afghanistan’s communist leader from 1979 to 1986, during most of the Soviet war against the Mujahideen.
The Taliban stopped these subsidies, an important source of funds for tribes living at subsistance levels, and now ask Pakistani Pashtun to show identity cards while in Afghanistan — something previously unheard of.
“ These Taliban have done nothing for us,” Afridi said.—Reuters
