Jihad Recruitment Drives Sweeps Pakistan Area
By Tom Heneghan
PESHAWAR (Reuters) - Historic clan ties and religious zeal have fueled a recruitment drive among untrained young men in Pakistan's tribal areas eager to face off with the best troops from the world's only superpower, tribal sources say.
The recruitment in the often-lawless tribal belt is fueled by anger among thousands of men anxious to wage a jihad or holy war if U.S. ground troops invade neighboring Afghanistan (news - web sites), they said.
``They're willing to go and fight. When Mullah Omar calls, they will be ready,'' said Sabir Afridi, a trader in a smugglers' market from the Afridi tribe, the largest in Pakistan's Khyber Pass area.
Tribesmen said Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the fundamentalist Taliban movement governing Afghanistan, had asked them not to enter the country until Washington -- now bombing Taliban targets daily -- sends in ground forces in its ''war on terror.''
They added Islamic fundamentalist parties kept on a tight leash elsewhere in Pakistan were 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.
But the big question now was how many of these cheering untrained ``jihadis'' would actually go and fight and what difference they could make when faced with crack Western commando teams backed by the world's only superpower.
Ninety percent 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.''
The Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group but a minority in Pakistan, have long ignored the 1893 Durand Line separating them.
Islamabad has cracked down on pro-Taliban fundamentalist parties in the rest of Pakistan, but cannot stop them in the tribal lands bordering eastern Afghanistan because tribal elders traditionally are the supreme authority there.
ISLAMIC PARTY DRIVE
Nobody knows how many men may have signed up, and estimates have to be taken with a grain of salt, 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 specializing in the tribal belt. Tribesmen often take their tribe's name as a last name, without necessarily being related to others also using it.
Recruiting was considerably stronger in North and South Waziristan, two of the seven agencies or districts in the poverty-stricken tribal belt where more than three million Pakistani Pashtuns live. Foreigners are barred from the tribal belt for reasons of security.
Leading the recruiting drive is the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam, a fundamentalist party whose colorful 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 reported they had recently collected three million rupees $500,000, 18 lbs. of gold and jewelry as well as four truckloads of sheep and goats to contribute to the Afghan cause.
Pakistan, now keen to keep a distance from the Taliban it once strongly promoted, demanded customs duties on the gifts, forcing the tribe to sell the goods and just smuggle the money into Afghanistan.
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 friend 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 moderate Pakistan Muslim League party, said Pakistani Pashtun were unlikely to rally to the Taliban side.
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 a bid for their support.
``Babrak Karmal gave every tribesman who came to Kabul a Kalashnikov and 30,000 rupees ($500) and they reciprocated by making it hard for the Mujahideen (holy warriors) 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 subsistence 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.