About 2,000 supporters of the Taliban rallied in Peshawar to denounce a crackdown on radical Islamic groups in the country. Leaders of the rally said they had the right to wage jihad. "We can remove Musharraf whenever we want to," Syed Munawar Hassan, acting chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, told the rally. Maulana Samiul Haq, head of the 35-party pro-Taliban Pakistan-Afghanistan Defence Council, told the crowd Muslims would continue to wage jihad against non-Muslims in places such as Chechnya, Palestine and Afghanistan. The protesters, who gathered at a football ground in Peshawar, denounced what they called the inhuman and insulting treatment of Al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners by US forces, and demanded a halt to the "acts of barbarism".
People who lop off other people's heads, chop off their hands, and marry 12-year-old girls describe us as committing "acts of barbarism"? |