AID workers in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier are being attacked by the country’s growing army of Taliban-style mullahs.
One, Maulana Zia ul Haq, has published a fatwa:
i)ordering any “Anglo-Saxon” entering his territory to be killed.
ii) He has also warned Pakistani women working for a British-funded aid agency that they will be kidnapped and forcibly married to “keep them at home, where they belong”.
Maulana Zia ul Haq said:
“Infidels have prevented Osama bin Laden from travelling. Why should they[AID workers] be able to travel here?”
Other aid workers in the district have also been attacked, with the support of the local administration and the backing of local landlords.
“The mullahs have entered into a pact with local landlords and the district administration,” said Maryam Bibi, who runs Khwendo Kor, a British-funded teaching organisation, which has been attacked.
“The landlords feel that we’re challenging their power structure because we work at a grassroots level, and the mullahs have their own agenda.”
The fatwa against women working for Khwendo Kor, or Women’s Home, was issued earlier this month. Khwendo Kor is funded by the British Government and some European aid agencies. It provides primary school education for girls as well as boys in a mountainous area near the Afghan border.
Last week, the mullah, who refuses to talk to foreigners even over the telephone, was unrepentant:
“I stick to my stand,” he told a local journalist.
“I’ve ordered my people to pick up any woman working for a non-governmental organisation and marry her. They’re visiting villages, meeting our women and teaching them their rights.”
Khwendo Kor, which has its headquarters in Dir, has established 40 village schools with the help of parents in the past two years and now teaches 1,500 girls. Before 1969, there were no schools in Dir.