Pakistan Islamists vow jihad year after mosque siege

By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Thousands of Pakistani Islamists vowed support for jihad, or Muslim holy war, on Sunday as they gathered at a mosque in the capital, Islamabad, to mark the first anniversary of an army raid on the complex.

More than 100 people were killed when commandos stormed the Red Mosque complex, which included a madrasa or Islamic seminary, on July 10 last year, after a week-long siege that began when gunmen from the mosque clashed with police outside.

Speakers told a crowd of several thousand, most of them men, that U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf was to blame for the bloodshed.

"Pervez Musharraf, you thought you could crush the Islamic movement by attacking the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), but we are telling you, you have failed," Shah Abdul Aziz, a cleric and former member of the parliament, told the crowd.

"It was done at the behest of America and Bush. But I want to tell America jihad will continue, it will never stop," he said.

The protesters, most of them religious students, shouted "al jihad" in response.

The mosque's hardline clerics and supporters waged a violent campaign to enforce Taliban-style rule, kidnapping women they accused of prostitution and some policemen, and storming music and video shops and beauty parlours.

They also accumulated weapons at the complex in the heart of the capital and battled security forces for days, rejecting appeals to surrender, after the siege began.