The Agence France-Presse similarly reported, “‘Everything has changed in 10 years: most of the tribal leaders have been killed and the tribal system destroyed by the Islamists. We can’t dance any more, or play music at weddings,’ said Miramshah shopkeeper Qader Gul, 56. ‘Anyone who protests risks having a member of his family kidnapped, beaten or killed.’”20
Having brutally achieved widespread control over many of the people and much of the countryside of the FATA by late 2003, the Pakistani Taliban prepared to resist the Pakistani army. The conflict came to a head in March 2004, when Pakistani infantry and mountaineering divisions tried to storm positions held by hundreds of Pakistani Taliban troops protecting al Qaeda fighters near the South Waziristan town of Wana. The Pakistani forces were convinced that al Qaeda leader Zawahiri was among the Taliban militants and were determined to capture or kill him. But the estimated three hundred to four hundred militants fought back ferociously from their compounds and killed between sixty and a hundred Pakistani troops, once again highlighting the difficulties in using conventional means to arrest terrorists in this sort of dangerous tribal region.21
To defuse the situation, the Pakistani government did an about-face and signed the first of many placating peace deals with the emboldened Pakistani Taliban in April 2004. The man who emerged to sign the so-called Shakai Peace Accords on behalf of the local Taliban was a charismatic South Waziristani Pashtun tribesman named Nek Muhammad. He was said never to have retreated in battle and had earned the nickname “Bogoday” (the Stubborn One).
Nek Muhammad had been forced to flee Afghanistan in 2001, when the United States invaded and the Taliban army melted away under U.S. bombs and Northern Alliance Uzbek cavalry charges. At this time Muhammad led many of his Arab and Uzbekistani jihadi compatriots across the Pakistani border to his native South Waziristan. There he and his fellow Waziri Pashtun tribemen offered the foreigners the hospitality of melmastiia. The Pakistani government insisted that the foreigners be turned over to them, but Muhammad adamantly refused to surrender fellow Muslim fighters to the U.S. puppet government of President Musharraf.
As previously mentioned, soon thereafter the Pakistani government signed the Shakai Peace Treaty with Nek Muhammad, who interpreted this treaty as a capitulation by the Pakistani army. To sign the treaty, a Pakistani general actually flew to Nek Muhammad’s territory and symbolically recognized his authority by placing a garland of flowers around his neck. As part of the treaty, Muhammad was told he had to turn over foreigners in his territory, but he promptly declared that there were no foreigners in his lands to turn over.22 Nek Muhammad had thus broken a major stipulation of the treaty before the ink on it had dried. As if to pour salt in the Pakistani army’s wounds, at this time he also promised to launch terrorist attacks throughout Pakistan to punish the government for invading South Waziristan in the first place.23
Like Mullah Omar, who refused to turn over bin Laden back in 2001, Nek Muhammad had made a decision to stand up to the Americans. No amount of military incursions or appeasing peace treaties could convince the Stubborn One to turn over his Arab and Uzbekistani guests. Instead, he began launching small-scale attacks on Pakistani troops and declared that his people had “fought a jihad against the Russians and before them the British. Now that the Americans are here we will wage jihad against them.”24
As the Pakistani Taliban metastasized and began to threaten both Pakistan and the United States, it became clear that Nek Muhammad was the major impediment to joint Pakistani-U.S. operations designed to flush out al Qaeda operatives hiding in the tribal areas. For his part Muhammad seemed to relish the notoriety that came from his decision to stand up to both the Pakistani army and the Americans. In many interviews by the media, he boldly promised to wage total jihad against the Pakistani government and its U.S. allies. Safe in his inaccessible tribal land, surrounded by thousands of armed followers, Muhammad seemed untouchable.
Then, on June 19, 2004, the Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn reported that the Stubborn One had been killed two days earlier:
Security forces have killed Nek Mohammad and four other tribal militants in a missile attack on a village in Wana, the regional headquarters of the South Waziristan Agency. “Nek Mohammad was suspected to be present in a hideout with his associates and our security forces acted swiftly on the information and that is how he was killed,” a [Pakistani] military spokesman said on Friday.
Residents of Shah Nawaz Kot, a small hamlet about two kilometers south of Scouts Camp, said the 27-year-old militant was killed when his hideout was hit by a missile. The attack was reportedly carried out at 10pm on Thursday night when Nek Mohammad was taking dinner along with his colleagues in the courtyard of the house of his long-time friend, the late Sher Zaman Ashrafkhel, an Afghan refugee from his Ahmadzai Wazir tribe.
Witnesses said that Nek Mohammad’s face bore burn marks and his left hand and leg appeared to have been badly injured in the explosion. “Why aren’t you putting a bandage on my arm,” were his last words, those accompanying Nek Mohammad to the hospital quoted him as saying.25
Pakistani security forces were thus said to have “acted swiftly” to kill Muhammad with a surprisingly accurate missile strike at night. But the Pakistanis had never carried out such a precise, nighttime strike before, and military experts doubted they had the technology to do so. Pakistani reporters began asking questions in hopes of clarifying how exactly the Pakistani army had carried out this feat. The Dawn story suggested that although the Pakistanis claimed the strike as their own, in actuality it was conducted by an American drone flying from Afghanistan. After dutifully sharing the Pakistani military’s official version of the death of Nek Muhammad, Dawn contradicted the official claim:
Witnesses said that a spy drone was seen flying overhead minutes before the missile attack. There were also reports that Nek Mohammad was speaking on a satellite phone when the missile struck, fuelling speculations that he might have been hit by a guided missile. The precision with which the missile landed right in the middle of the courtyard where Nek Mohammad and his colleagues were sitting, lent credence to the theory. Locals said that the missile created a six feet crater.
An associate of Nek Mohammad, who called the BBC Pushto office in Peshawar, also said that the tribal militant had been killed while speaking on a satellite phone. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) declined to speculate on how the militant had been killed.
“We have various means and a full array of weapons at our disposal. We have artillery that can fire with precision and we have helicopters with night vision capability which can fire guided missiles. But I am not going to give out operational secrets on how he was killed,” ISPR Director-General Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan told Dawn by phone from Islamabad.
“Absolutely absurd,” was his response when asked about rumors that Nek Mohammad had been killed with the US assistance. “Intelligence is like a jigsaw puzzle, it does not come from a single source on a single time,” Gen Sultan said.26