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Farewell, My Jihadi FriendThe final days of Abdul Rashid Ghazi.

By Nicholas SchmidlePosted Wednesday, July 11, 2007, at 6:01 PM ET

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During the curfew break on Friday, I teamed up with a couple of reporter friends who work for big papers, and we hustled over to the Holiday Inn, the closest hotel to Lal Masjid, to take a few rooms. Except for a handful of Pakistani journalists also holed up there, the place was completely abandoned. The management tried to charge $225 a night, but my big-budget friends talked them down to $100—"the stand-off special," as one called it. With the razor wire preventing people from getting close and the blackout preventing anyone from seeing what was going on, the only advantage the Holiday Inn provided was being able to hear the sound of bullets whizzing through the trees and that the bombs were a little louder. I stayed one night and decided that my house, just a mile down the road, offered a much cheaper, and safer, base.

Over the next few days, government spokesmen alleged that foreign militants, a euphemism for al-Qaida, were among those inside the mosque defending Ghazi. On Sunday night, a Predator drone, the same ones used by Americans to chase terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, buzzed over the city. The next night, a delegation of senior mullahs tried to persuade Ghazi to free the women and children inside. When they failed, the final phase of the commando operation—codenamed "Operation Silence"—started at 3:30 Tuesday morning. I was enjoying my first decent night's sleep in a week.

Around 9 on Tuesday evening, more than 12 hours after the army estimated the raid would be over, news channels reported Abdul Rashid Ghazi's death. Apparently, he took a shot in the leg, refused to surrender, and was then finally killed. The next morning, a full-page headline in Dawn, an English-language daily, read, "It's all over as Ghazi is killed." It's true: Ghazi is dead; his brother Abdul Aziz was detained after being arrested trying to escape in a burqa last Wednesday night; and Lal Masjid is in ruins. But the Taliban in Pakistan are far from defeated.

Since the operation began against Lal Masjid, neo-Taliban groups in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province have suicide-bombed a military convoy, attacked several police stations, and blocked the Karakorum Highway in protest. In the lawless tribal area of Bajaur, 20,000 tribesmen, some shouldering rocket-propelled grenades, rallied in support of Ghazi and encouraged him to "embrace martyrdom." Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, a well-known mujahid, told the gathering, "We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf, and we will seek revenge for the atrocities perpetrated on the Lal Masjid."

A few weeks ago, Ghazi had offered to introduce me to Maulvi Faqir. He said he'd write me a letter, but we both ran out of time, and I never stopped by to get it. Maybe Faqir will trust that Ghazi and I used to be chummy. But without his golden, handwritten reference, it's not worth taking a chance.