By Anwarullah Khan
Reuters
Wednesday, November 1, 2006; A15
KHAR, Pakistan, Oct. 31 -- More than 15,000 Pakistani tribesmen, many of them carrying rifles and ammunition, protested Tuesday over a Pakistani army helicopter attack on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school near here that killed about 80 suspected radicals.
Chants of "Down with America" and "Down with Musharraf," referring to Pakistan's president, rang out as the tribesmen protested in Khar, main town in the Bajaur tribal region close to the Afghan border.
"Our jihad will continue and, God willing, people will go to Afghanistan to oust American and British forces," Maulana Faqir Mohammad, a pro-Taliban cleric, told the crowd of turbaned tribal members. Some of them shouldered rocket launchers.
The government says the school at Chenagai was being used to train fighters and had been under surveillance since July.
Officials said it had been frequented in the past by Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda members including Abu Obaida al-Misri, whom security officials have named as the organizer of a plot that was broken up in August to blow up U.S.-bound airliners flying from London.
The officials said they did not believe any high-ranking radicals were present at the time of the airstrike. Protesters said the dead, mostly young men ages 15 to 25, were merely students.
But Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, speaking at a seminar in the capital, Islamabad, said they were all radicals. "We were working on them for six or seven days; we know who they were. They were doing military training," Musharraf said.
Nowhere is Musharraf's alliance with Washington more unpopular than in the Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Pakistani-Afghan border. A mountainous region that is difficult to reach, Bajaur lies across from the eastern Afghan province of Konar, where U.S. troops are hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Thousands of fighters took refuge in the semiautonomous tribal lands after U.S.-backed forces drove them from Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
On Tuesday, the tribesmen in Khar showed their loyalty with shouts of "Long Live Osama" and "Long Live Mullah Omar," referring to the Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Similar protests took place in other parts of North-West Frontier Province
A planned visit by Britain's Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, to the province's capital, Peshawar, on Tuesday was canceled because of security concerns.
