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Question mark over Radio Mullah’s death

[additional-authors]
May 27, 2010

The Pakistani media is going crazy with reports that Mullah Fazlullah, commonly referred to Radio Mullah, has been killed in a fight with security forces in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province that border’s Pakistan’s Dir.
Fazlullah (pronounced with a lifted, flourished ‘LaH’ at the end) became a nuisance after he started broadcasting his own version of Islam over the radio in Swat, a beautiful valley up north. Women would send him their bangles as donations and he managed to amass a small fortune with which he funded his fighters. He became such a nuisance that the army had to go in and thousands of people were displaced from their homes last year. As many of the fighters were just local kids, critics said that an operation wouldn’t help because they would just return home.

Postscript: Ha ha, just as I suspected, we’re not sure if he’s dead or alive. Sometimes I think it’s incredibly strange how we’ve become: we sit and speculate whether a man is dead or alive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not terribly fond of the guy; he wasn’t as good looking as my man Hakeemullah aka Orlando ‘Doom’. But living in Pakistan you are surrounded by so much violence (seen and unseen) that sometimes you lose perspective. For anyone interested in reading more on whether he is dead or alive, here is a link from the newspaper, where it is explored in more detail:
http://tribune.com.pk/story/16835/fazlullah-dead-or-alive/

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