Musharraf vows to crush Islamic extremists

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf, in his first public comment since his troops stormed a radical mosque in the heart of the capital, yesterday defended the government's decision to seize the compound by force and vowed to fight Islamic extremists "in every corner" of Pakistan.

Hours before the nationally televised address, the mosque's chief cleric offered a fiery funeral oration for his brother, a fellow cleric who was killed along with dozens of others in the two-day assault this week on the Red Mosque by elite special forces.

"God willing, Pakistan will soon have an Islamic revolution," Abdul Aziz, who was escorted by police commandos to the funeral of his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, in the family's ancestral village of Basti Abdullah in Pakistan's Punjab province.

"The blood of martyrs will bear fruit," said Aziz, who was captured days before the assault while trying to flee the mosque disguised as a woman.

Pakistan braced against reprisal attacks by Islamic militants who have vowed to exact vengeance for the storming of the mosque. In the latest of a string of deadly attacks in the tribal lands along the Afghan border, a suicide bomber killed two government officials yesterday in volatile North Waziristan and a suicide car bomber killed three policemen in another area.

In Islamabad, Pakistani officials took journalists on a tour of the ruined mosque complex, providing a look at the aftermath of more than 36 hours of fierce room-to-room combat that ended Wednesday. Walls were blackened and bullet-pocked; heaps of rubble still smoldered, and the ground was littered with spent ammunition and shattered glass.

Authorities were plainly eager to show the extent to which militants had turned the holy site into an armed fortress.

They displayed weapons caches including machine guns, mines, makeshift firebombs, and rocket-propelled grenades, and they pointed out homemade bunkers and snipers' nests scattered throughout the warren-like complex. Militant defenders staged at least two suicide bombings in the course of the assault, army spokesman Major General Washeed Arshad told reporters.

Even a full 24 hours after the confrontation's end, the number of deaths and the manner in which they occurred were being hotly debated. The government put the death toll at 108, about two-thirds of those killed during the assault and the remainder in the six days leading up to it.

Leaders of hard-line religious parties put the death toll far higher, claiming at least 400 people were killed but were unable to substantiate their claims.

Public opinion in Pakistan generally favored the mosque assault, which was launched after many calls for those inside to surrender and an explicit warning from Musharraf that they would be killed otherwise.

The government said it knew of no women or children killed during the storming of the mosque, but it acknowledged that nearly 20 bodies found inside were so charred that their age or gender had not been determined. About 1,300 people, including dozens of women and children, fled in the two days before the assault was launched.

In the months leading up to the Red Mosque standoff, the cleric brothers had orchestrated a vigilante campaign in the capital by the students, many of them female, to root out alleged vice, such as prostitution and the sale of music and videos.

In his speech, Musharraf pledged that religious institutions such as madrassas, or Islamic seminaries, would not be allowed to serve as breeding grounds for extremism.

"We will never allow any madrassa or mosque to be misused like the Red Mosque," he said.

Over the past five years, the Pakistani leader has been criticized at home and abroad for failing to live up to promises to reform the country's network of thousands of madrassas, apparently fearful of a backlash from religious hard-liners if he did so.

In his address, however, he denounced the Red Mosque leaders as going against the precepts of Islam: "What kind of Islam do these people represent?"

Musharraf, who is also chief of the country's military, praised the security forces for showing restraint and courage in the mosque assault, in which 10 soldiers died.

He acknowledged that sending troops to battle compatriots had been a painful step. "Unfortunately, we have been pitted against our own people," he said. "They had strayed from the correct path and become susceptible to terrorism."