Fazlullah does not concede defeat in Swat

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PESHAWAR – A newly released 40-minute video of Swat radical cleric Mullah Fazlullah shows him addressing a group of suicide bombers and firing gunshots, but analysts say the video does little to prove his group’s power.

Fazlullah led a two-year campaign to impose Shariah in the Swat Valley, beheading opponents and opposing education for girls, until the Pakistani military drove his forces out in May 2009.

The video, shot at an unknown place and time, shows Fazlullah talking to listeners he called suicide bombers, saying the government and the military are against them and they should target them. AFP received a copy of the video.

“They (Fazlullah and his militants) have been totally defeated in Swat, and I don’t think they can come back to the area,” Rahimullah Yousafzai, senior journalist and analyst, told Central Asia Online by phone. Fazlullah claimed in the video that leaving Swat was his group’s strategy, but Yousafzai rejects the claim.

“It was not a strategy. They were compelled to leave Swat as they were completely defeated,” Yousafzai said. He said Fazlullah and his militants once fully controlled the area, but they were unable to withstand the Pakistani military operation and were killed, arrested or forced to flee.

“Some of his important commanders have been killed, some arrested and still the army has about 3,000 militants in its custody,” Yousafzai said.

Soon after the new video emerged, an anti-terror court in Swat declared him and 49 other suspected militants as wanted terrorists, Dawn reported July 23. The other wanted terrorists included militant commander Shah Doran.

On May 24, the governor of Nuristan Province in Afghanistan told reporters in Jalalabad that about 300 heavily armed men, led by Fazlullah, attacked a remote district of his province, triggering heavy fighting between the militants and the Afghan police.

On May 26, Mohammad Zaman Mamoozai, commander of border police in eastern Afghanistan, told Central Asia Online the Pakistani militant leader was killed in a shootout with Afghan police in the Barg-e-Matal district of Nuristan Province.

The Pakistani army is now establishing a cantonment in Swat, which will make it impossible for militants to return to the area, Yousafzai said.