ISLAMABAD, 2 June 2004 — Most of the victims are from Pakistan’s Shiite Muslim minority, but the real aim is to undermine President Pervez Musharraf, say analysts assessing Karachi’s descent into a bloody spate of sectarian violence.
At least 20 people were killed and about 50 wounded in a bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in the restive southern city on Monday, less than a month after a similar attack on another mosque in which 24 were killed. The perpetrators, analysts suspect, are militants belonging to the Sunni Muslim majority, to which Musharraf belongs
Musharraf made die-hard militants his enemies by abandoning support for the Taleban regime in neighboring Afghanistan and joining the US-led war on terror in late 2001, and later by pursuing peace with India. “All these groups think they have been betrayed by the government of Pakistan,” political analyst Hasan Askari said. “These attacks appear to be meant to create chaos to avenge this betrayal. And if you want to create chaos, you can make it a sectarian or any other form,” he said.
It is a commonly held opinion among Pakistan’s political thinkers. “There can be other reasons for these attacks but the main reason remains the same — the war on terror,” said Dr. Mutahir Ahmed, professor of international relations at Karachi University. Musharraf narrowly escaped two attempts on his life late last year in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, which were blamed on Islamic militants with links to Al-Qaeda.
Pakistan, created in 1947 as a home for South Asia’s Muslims, saw sectarian rivalry early on between its Sunni majority and the Shiites who make up close to 20 percent of the Muslim population. Shiite militants lack the infrastructure to match their Sunni enemies bomb for bomb, and typically strike back by killing a Sunni religious leader.
The assassination of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a radical Sunni preacher, on Sunday looked to many like a classic case of Shiite revenge for a May 7 bomb attack. Shamzai had not been heavily linked to sectarian violence but the Binoria mosque complex he headed was a recruiting ground for the Mujahedeen, many of whom joined the Taleban, fought the Indian Army in Kashmir, and became comrades with Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.
Musharraf even sent Shamzai on a mission with the then head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmed, to try to persuade the Taleban to hand over Bin Laden in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States mission failed, and just months later Shamzai was again preaching holy war against the United States.
He is the fourth senior cleric at the Binoria mosque to have been gunned down over the past six years. Last year, Azam Tariq, head of the militant anti-Shiite Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet) group, was gunned down on the outskirts of Islamabad.
Karachi has seen a series of attacks on Western and Christian targets over the past two years. In 2002, police arrested a key Islamic militant in Karachi who was wanted in connection with an assassination plot against Musharraf. Last Wednesday, a policeman was killed and more than 30 people hurt when two car bombs detonated by suspected Sunni militants exploded near the home of the US consul.
That attack came hard on the heels of the arrest of six members of the Harkatul Mujahedeen Al-Alami, an Al-Qaeda-linked group involved in the 2002 plot against the president. Analysts say continuing militant attacks in Pakistan carried a message for Musharraf that they would hit back if his government tried to squeeze them more.
“They want to tell the government that they can make the life miserable if they were targeted,” analyst Askari said. “They want to ... (show) they can stir disturbance anywhere in the country, no matter, in whatever shape.”
