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Inside seminary, every room was a battlefield

Nirupama Subramanian

After the intense battle with militants holed up inside, the Jamia Hafsa has suffered serious damage

— Photos: AFP

The aftermath: The bullet riddled Jamia Hafsa in the Lal Masjid complex in Islamabad on Thursday. At right, policemen escort Abdul Aziz, chief cleric of the Masjid, as he arrives at Basti Abdullah village to attend the last rites of his younger bother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi.

ISLAMABAD: Heaps of burning mattresses and clothes, twisted and broken furniture, mounds of rubble, gutted rooms, broken staircases, walls pockmarked with bullets and stained with blood.

That is pretty much what remains of Jamia Hafsa, the scene of an intense battle between militants holed up inside.

The neighbouring Lal Masjid also bore signs of intense fighting but was not as seriously damaged, even though military spokesman Major-General Waheed Arshad, who conducted a media tour of the complex on Thursday, said the toughest resistance against the operation came from within the mosque.

Bullets had perforated a metal sheet over one of its halls but the structure of the mosque seemed largely intact. The mosque’s minarets were standing but damaged, where the military said snipers had taken position, and security forces had fired in retaliation. The entrance and some walls inside, in addition to being riddled with bullets, were also blackened by a fire.

The military spokesman said the militants had used petrol bombs against troops entering the mosque.

It was the six-storeyed Jamia Hafsa that was unrecognisable as the school famous for its hundreds of black-robed, stick-wielding and jihadi slogan-shouting women. Its outer walls had crumbled into heaps of rubble, and inside the building, it appeared that every room was a battlefield.

The room in the basement where the militant cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi was holed up and was finally killed, bore signs of intense fighting. It was gutted, indicating that those inside may have used petrol bombs to ward off troops as they entered it.

There was broken glass everywhere, in addition to spend bullets. The space in front of the windows had been cleared so that the fighters could take position against security forces firing from outside. In what looked like a library, books lay scattered from their shelves. The shelves and tables had been shifted around.

Ceiling fans were missing blades. In one room, trunks that presumably belonged to the students who studied and lived there, were thrown in a heap, and were presumably used as barricade.

A room equipped with computers and sewing machines was badly pockmarked, with all the machines in it damaged. In the midst of this mayhem, it was surprising to come across a pile of neatly folded mattresses, all covered with a big sheet, and untouched by the fighting.

In some places, there were blood stains where people had been killed or injured. In the front room, that was at one time the Madrassa’s reception area, the military displayed all ammunition it said it had found in the premises. This correspondent counted 50 kalashnikovs, aside from rockets and rocket launchers, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, petrol bombs, small arms, heaps of bullets and several kinds of improvised explosive devices.

In between the Madrassa and the mosque, the public library for children that the Jamia Hafsa students had occupied in January, also seemed to have taken a good part of the fighting, especially on the side facing the mosque.

Major-Gen Arshad said the Army would stay in the complex as long as the civilian administration deemed it necessary.

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