Volunteers Can Hold Off, Taliban Says

MINGAORA, Pakistan â€”  The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said Monday that thousands of armed volunteers camped at the border in northwestern Pakistan are not needed yet inside Afghanistan because “we already have plenty of moujahedeen on the front line.â€�

The arrival of thousands more fighters in a makeshift convoy of trucks and buses, Taliban Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef said, “will create congestion on the roads and increase the chances of mass casualties from an airstrike.�

“But if they are needed in the future, we will call them,� Zaeef added during his regular afternoon news conference on the lawn of the Taliban embassy in Islamabad. Later he said that the Taliban gets “new volunteers every day, but we have to turn them down because the ground battle hasn’t started yet.�

Several thousand volunteers remained in the Bajaur border area while a delegation from their ranks traveled around eastern Afghanistan meeting with Taliban officials, according to Anwar Rullah Khan, a correspondent with the Dawn newspaper group.

“There are still thousands of men at the border waiting for the call,� Khan said. Foreign journalists are banned from entering the restricted tribal area where the volunteers have gathered.

Volunteers’ Arms Include Muskets

Called to jihad, or holy war, by fundamentalist Pakistani clerics, the volunteers are armed with weapons ranging from grenade launchers to antique muskets. Most are ethnic Pushtuns who move easily between the two countries.

When the ragtag army of teenage recruits and grizzled veterans of earlier jihads arrived at the Bajaur site beginning late last week, its members were welcomed as heroes by the local population. Many are followers of a local cleric, Sofi Mohammadi, founder of the fundamentalist order Movement for the Enforcement of the Laws of Muhammad, based in the nearby city of Dir.

Mohammadi’s followers were also among those participating in the blockade of the Karakoram Highway, a major route that links Pakistan with China through some of the highest mountain passes in the world.

However, Mohammadi has ordered his followers to end their participation, and there were hopes in the Pakistani government that he would also disband the volunteers massed on the border.

Interviewed at the border by Pakistani journalists, Mohammadi’s son Fazilullah said that, whatever the outcome of the continuing talks with the Taliban, he still expected that some of the crowd would join the Taliban forces.

“I think they will go in small batches,� Fazilullah told the reporters.

In an earlier interview, a commander in Mohammadi’s movement, Qari Faizal Rabbi, said the volunteers hope to link up with Taliban units defending the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif against advancing opposition forces.