Anti-US protests continue in Pakistan

Demonstrations against the recent US airstrike in Pakistan have continued, as thousands of Pakistanis took to the streets and condemned the raid as a flagrant violation of their country's sovereignty. On Jan. 20, around 2,000 demonstrators marched through the town of Wana and more than 1,000 led by hardliners in the northwestern city of Peshawar chanted "We are ready to support Osama and Zawahiri." "Musharraf cannot protect the country because he is protecting American interests," Abdul Ghaffar, a leader of the Muttahid Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) religious alliance, told the rally in central Peshawar. Another MMA leader asked the protesters to raise their hands if they were ready for a "holy war," and most members of the crowd raised their hands, witnesses said. Protest leaders signed a petition calling on the government to shut down the US consulate in Peshawar. "The US action in Bajur shows our government's failure. It has got atom bombs and jets but it cannot stop foreign forces intruding into its territory," tribal elder Maulana Abdul Aziz told the crowd, referring to the Bajur tribal area where the attack took place. About 1,500 tribesmen in the Mohamand tribal district bordering Afghanistan held another rally against the airstrike. Hundreds of people also held demonstrations outside mosques in the eastern city of Lahore, near the border with India. Some 200 lawyers rallied outside the High Court building in the city while protesters gathered outside the headquarters of Pakistan's largest hardline religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami. Separately, lawyers in the central city of Multan boycotted courts to protest against the airstrikes and what they called Musharraf's pro-US policies. "The US attack is a threat to the country's sovereignty. It seems our rulers have mortgaged Pakistan's independence with the United States," Muhammad Irfan Wyne, of the High Court Bar Association, told the rally. About 5,000 demonstrators shouting "Long live Osama bin Laden!" and "Death to America!" assembled on Jan. 22 in the town of Inayat Qala, not far from the site of the strike. "This attack has increased our hatred for Americans because they are killing innocent women and children," said Zakir Ullah, one of the demonstrators. Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was allegedly the target of the Jan. 13 missile raid in the Bajur tribal region that killed at least 22 civilians. US counterterrorism officials have said that they believe the attack killed four to eight al-Qaida-affiliated "foreigners" attending a dinner meeting. They cited intelligence that indicated that their bodies were removed from the scene and buried elsewhere. A counterterrorism official said Abu Khabab–an al-Qaida operative who was also known as "the bombmaker"–"was thought to have been in the vicinity" when the missiles struck. Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has ridiculed the US account as "bizarre." "There is no evidence... that there were any other people there," Aziz said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" on Jan. 22. "The area does see movement of people from across the border. But we have not found one body or one shred of evidence that these people were there," he said. Aziz said that "we heard that there was a dinner meeting with all the seniors [al-Qaida leaders]–I think that's a bizarre thought, because these people don't get together for dinner in a terrain or environment like that." "We don't know who was there," he said. "We don't know when they came, if at all." Aziz said Pakistani officials were given no notice before the attack, which was believed to have been launched by a missile-firing Predator drone launched from Afghanistan, where some 20,000 US troops are based. Pakistan does not allow US forces to pursue militants across the border or launch strikes without permission.