A deadly attack on Pakistan's Shiite Muslims was aimed at persuading President Pervez Musharraf to soften his crackdown on extremist Islamic groups and weaken his support for the US, analysts said.
Suicide attackers killed 44 Shiites with guns and grenades and then blew themselves up on Tuesday in the southwestern city of Quetta near the Afghanistan border, turning a celebration of one the holiest Shiite days into a bloodbath.
PHOTO: AFP
"The attack was specifically linked to the heightened operation against militants in the tribal areas," political analyst Nasim Zehra said.
Musharraf -- a staunch supporter of Washington's "war on terror" -- has banned extremist Islamic groups, sectarian and Kashmiri separatist organizations, and hunted down al-Qaeda sus-pects in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistani forces fanned out across lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border last week and detained 20 suspects.
Analyst and commentator Ayaz Amir said that the aim of Tuesday's attack was to send a message to Musharraf's government.
"In this case, sectarianism is a form of anti-government protest," he said. "When you want unrest in Pakistan, you are putting pressure on the government."
Two assassination attempts against Musharraf last December linked to radical Islamic fighters angered by his policies have underlined the scale of the challenge militants pose.
The Quetta attack, blamed on majority Sunni Muslims, was the worst of its kind in Pakistan since last July's suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in the same city killed 57 people and coincided with a series of bomb blasts in the Iraqi cities of Kerbala and Baghdad that killed at least 169 worshippers.
Pakistani analysts said the attacks were unlikely to be directly connected but did appear to have a similar purpose.
"One link is there, and that is to create unrest and anarchy in both countries," Amir said.
But British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the attacks were clearly linked.
AL-QAEDA INVOLVEMENT QUESTIONED
The US-appointed Governing Council in Iraq has blamed the violence there on a suspected member of the militantly Sunni al-Qaeda network.
Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is believed to be a target of the coordinated Pakistani and US operations along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier close to Quetta. Washington says the Saudi born bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide hijack attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Analysts say al-Qaeda might not be directly involved in the Quetta attack, but Sunni extremist groups are ideologically close to the group and its Taliban allies, whose rule over Afghanistan was ended by a US-led alliance in 2001.
"The sectarian extremists who are against Shiites follow the same interpretation of Islam which is followed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban," said Mehdi Hasan, a Pakistan political commentator.
The banned Sunni sectarian group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, known to have links to al-Qaeda, was initially blamed for the attack.
Last September, Pakistani police named the suspected mastermind of the July Quetta attack as a relative of an al-Qaeda member convicted of a 1993 bombing at New York's World Trade Center.
Pakistan has arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the last two-and-a-half years and banned extremist groups, including some involved in violence in Indian Kashmir.
Most of the outlawed militant groups are Sunni Muslims. Shiites make up some 15 percent of the overwhelmingly Sunni Pakistan, which has a population of around 150 million.
`Soft targets'
Analysts said the assailants in Pakistan and Iraq hit "soft targets," striking on a day when Shiites were celebrating "Ashura" or the 10th day of a holy period known as Muharram.
During Ashura Shiites take to the streets beating their chests and flogging themselves with steel flails in memory of Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, killed and beheaded in Iraq some 1,300 years ago.
"Muharram processions are extremely vulnerable targets," Zehra said.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
A new online voting system aimed at boosting turnout among the Philippines’ millions of overseas workers ahead of Monday’s mid-term elections has been marked by confusion and fears of disenfranchisement. Thousands of overseas Filipino workers have already cast their ballots in the race dominated by a bitter feud between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his impeached vice president, Sara Duterte. While official turnout figures are not yet publicly available, data from the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) showed that at least 134,000 of the 1.22 million registered overseas voters have signed up for the new online system, which opened on April 13. However,
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
RSS