Killings of Anti-Taliban Leaders Rattle Swat Valley - NYTimes.com

Killings of Anti-Taliban Leaders Rattle Swat Valley - NYTimes.com
Killings Rattle Pakistan’s Swat Valley
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
Published: April 22, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At least five anti-Taliban political leaders have been killed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan over the past two weeks, residents there said, raising fears that the Taliban forces that once ruled the area could be regrouping.

The pro-government leaders were killed in three separate attacks starting April 13, residents of the valley said in telephone interviews on Thursday. It was not clear who the killers were, but all the victims were people from the area who had been central to peace talks in the valley, the residents said.
The Swat Valley was the site of a major military operation against Taliban militants last spring. Since then life has returned to the valley, but the relative peace has been punctuated by what human rights groups describe as the covert killings and detentions of people suspected of being Taliban members or collaborators.
Shortly after the operation ended, bodies began surfacing with notes pinned to their clothing identifying them as Taliban sympathizers. Some blamed the army, but others said they were reprisals by locals. Four suicide bombers have struck in the intervening months.
Some worry that the assassinations of the pro-government leaders could mark a new chapter in the region’s struggle. The killings, first reported in the Daily Times, a Pakistani newspaper, have raised fears that the Taliban, whose top leader is still at large, are trying to reassert themselves.
The re-emergence of the Taliban now would not only prove embarrassing to the military, but it would also underscore the continuing difficulties that Pakistan faces in establishing government authority over areas where the military has succeeded in driving out militants.
“The target killing of the notables has created a great scare in the area,” said Ziauddin Yousafzai, who runs a school in Mingora, the valley’s biggest city. The killings, he said, are particularly disturbing because the victims appear to have been carefully selected in an effort to terrorize local leadership.
In what appeared to be an acknowledgment of this concern, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, traveled to Swat this week and reassured leaders there that the military would not abandon them and would continue to fight militants.
The Taliban had gradually tightened their grip on Swat over a number of years as the government and military struck multiple peace deals with the militants. But last spring Pakistani forces finally went into Swat in a large-scale operation, capturing several of the Taliban’s senior leaders and killing large numbers of militants.
But the Taliban’s leader in Swat, known only as Fazlullah, who used an FM radio station to acquire an audience, has remained at large.
The first of the pro-government leaders killed recently was Sajjad Ali Khan, a former village mayor who was a member of the Awami National Party, a secular political party. He was sitting in a clothing shop in Mingora around 6 p.m. April 13, talking with the shop owner, when gunmen with pistols fired at them, killing both, according to a friend of Mr. Khan’s who asked not to be identified out of safety concerns.
Mr. Khan had worked hard against the Taliban, his friend said, organizing a defense team, or lashkar, for his village. In a clue that the Taliban might have been behind his death, Mr. Khan had received text messages on his cellphone, warning him that “we are not finished” and “we will take revenge against you,” his friend said.
A few days later, two more activists from the same political party were killed in Dharai, a village just north of Mingora. The two men, identified by locals as Alamgir Khan and Mukaram Khan, were killed by gunfire while sitting in a shop in their village.
On Monday, two more prominent locals were killed, this time in the village of Kuza Bandai in the same area. The victims, Behr-e-Kharam and Aqil Shah, were standing in front of a bank in the village’s central market, said a prominent landowner from the village, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. Both were members of the village’s peace committee, the landowner said.
Both villages are near where Fazlullah was based. Some locals said most of the problems in the valley were coming from there.
One local leader said in an interview in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, that the killings were being carried out by remnants of the Taliban network. The militants, he said, would not be able to re-establish control over the area with the army there, but they could use the hit-and-run tactics to keep it off balance.
The assassinations appeared to have provoked retaliation killings. On Thursday, the bodies of four men surfaced in Kuza Bandai’s central square, a relative of the landowner said. The relative said that people in the area believe the dead men were Taliban militants, though no death notes were attached to their clothes, as is sometimes the practice, and it was impossible to verify their identities.
The killings come as the provincial government prepares to begin spending the $36 million that the United States has allocated for rebuilding the area, said a senior official in the province. Mr. Yousafzai said reconstruction, though slow, had been happening.