Recently, Pakistan has been hit by new waves of sectarian attacks and tension. It seems much deeper and strong. President Mushrraff has asked the nation for unity. I can understand that situation in Iraq has some affect but not this profound. Most of the Shia and Sunni in Pakistan live peacefully and average citizen do not hold any grudge like in Iraq or any other place.
Why the people who commit this violence have such a strong hold in Pakistan?
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
i'm 100000 % against human execution by another human.....
but for ppl like these who kill each other in the name of religion.........
line them up an shoot them in the head on a national TV . It should be a lesson for rest of the fanatics.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
weve got no tension among joe public. inshalla this situation will be dealt with swiftly as everyone hopes.
we have a problem with extremist groups that have formed, its time now to roundup all extremist group organisers.
its probable that the sectarian attacks and attempts during this last week have been carried out by one group - a group which is living on borrowed time. they have no hold just braindead recruits.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
im glad to read this as it confirms the planners were from our troubled region
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\01\30\story_30-1-2007_pg1_2
6 held for ‘planning suicide attacks’
LAHORE: Law-enforcement agencies have shifted six men, who were arrested on Monday morning in Dera Ismail Khan on suspicion of planning suicide attacks during Ashura, to Islamabad. The men were arrested in a raid by intelligence agencies in Nawab Zafar Colony. Six suicide belts and some videos were also retrieved. Sources said the arrested men were believed to be members of the Baitullah Mehsud group. They said that investigators were focusing on arresting more accomplices of the men in custody, as their arrest was followed by a suicide blast in Dera Ismael Khan’s Liaqat Park. Baitullah Mehsud is a leading Taliban commander in Waziristan. AFP reported that sectarian literature and a computer disk showing militants slaughtering two suspected government spies were also recovered from the suspects’ custody. “We believe the group was planning suicidal attacks in the country,” said the official. staff report
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
It is very easy to bury our heads in the sand, but not too long ago there bombings and indiscriminate shootings at Imam-bargah and mosques to kill people of opposite sect, when that happens people of that locality get tense, people of those communities get tense with fear of being targeted next. This time the same is being tried, all they need is big violence in 3-4 places and we will be travelling history again. God save us from devil within ourselves.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
If found guilty perfect grounds for public execution.. I hope…
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
Captain1 what do you want to say? Quote all they need is big violence in 3-4 places and we will be travelling history again. God save us from devil within ourselves. unquote
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
How and who do we round up when most of the time police and our intelligence agencies are unable to pin point the people behind the attacks?
We assume that it is because of sectarian tensions, extremists, revenge on Pakistan’s air strike, Al-Qaeda and many more. No one seems to know and every year blast happens, innocents get killed…speculations are made with some arrests but situation remains the same…why?
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
The Police Forensic Team look at the bomb itself and using the various ID Numbers on the equipment on the bomb can back trace the bomb and surveillence who ever came in contact with the bomb.
And thus they can arrest the people behind these acts
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
you are right nothing can be assumed. the investigation must be thorough. groups should be neutralised in their intirety but in the past they obviously havent been. i expect progress in this field as pakistani agencies eqquip themselves with better investigation tools in the future. as you saw with indian police/agencies investigating mumbai bombings they were struggling
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
hopefully atleast after this series it will dawn on the aristocrats to look at the root causes rather than simply beating up some roadside hooligans. Here is a clue - start watching the longbeards
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
Most unfortunate thing is that in Pakistan the people in agencies themsleves have taken sides of different sects and secretely support them or turn a blind eye.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
correct @ blind eye to some extent
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
**Look at this
**
Amid Sunni fears of a growing “Shia arc”, tensions between the main Muslim sects are widening, while some governments are exploiting them
ISRAEL and America are stirring conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims so as to plunder their wealth, declares Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel and America are stoking Sunni fear of Shias to distract from the true cause of Palestine, says the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mehdi Akef. Evidently, there is a meeting of minds between the leader of the most powerful Shia state and the head of the world’s most influential Sunni political movement.
On the ground across much of the Middle East, the spectre of fitna, or sectarian schism, has rarely loomed larger. This week in Iraq, yet another round of bombs deliberately targeted Shia civilians, killing scores. Shia militias responded by lobbing mortars into Sunni districts and by snatching and executing Sunni men. A series of deadly attacks against Shia mosques in Pakistan added a dozen more victims to the estimated 2,000 killed over 15 years of sporadic sectarian violence. In Lebanon, a row in a college cafeteria snowballed into running street battles between followers of rival Sunni and Shia parties; four were killed. The preacher at a slain Sunni youth’s funeral described him as a “martyr to Arabism”—a subtle jibe at the ostensibly “Persian” Shias and their leading party in Lebanon, Hizbullah.
This was the week of Ashura, a Shia festival that commemorates martyrdom and has often proved a tense period in places where Islam's two main sects both reside. Yet communal feelings are rising even where Shias, around 15% of the world's Muslims, have little or no presence. In December, Sudan's authorities closed Iran's stall at a Khartoum book fair after Sunni activists accused it of spreading Shia propaganda. Algerian newspapers say Shia missionaries are inveigling Sunni children to convert. Supporters of Fatah, a secular Palestinian party, have taken to chanting “Shia! Shia!” at backers of the Islamist (and Sunni) Hamas party, in a dig against its strong ties to Iran. In Jordan, villagers turned back pilgrims going to a local Shia shrine. Shias say that last month's attacks by vandals in the American city of Detroit on two Shia community centres and some Shia-owned businesses were sectarian.
Some of the alarm appears to be orchestrated. In the culmination of a month-long barrage of innuendo against Iran in Egypt’s state-owned press, a recent editorial in the staid Cairo daily, al-Ahram, charged the Islamic Republic with undermining chances for peace in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. The goal, it suggested, was to weaken Sunni Arab states so as to realise “Safavid dreams” of Shia expansion, a reference to the 16th-century dynasty that enshrined Shiism as Iran’s state religion. Citing unnamed Egyptian officials, the same newspaper floated charges that Iranian intelligence agents were responsible for the kidnap and murder of Egypt’s ambassador in Iraq in July 2005.
A similar campaign has unfolded in Saudi Arabia, where increasingly internet chat sites, several of which are widely believed to be infiltrated by police agents, are rife with spurious tales of Shia perfidy. A typical item affirms that, when told of Sunni fears of a “Shia crescent” spreading across the region, Iran’s president said he envisioned not a crescent but a full moon. While a columnist in one Saudi daily asserted, falsely, that Shias believe they must perform ablutions if they happen to touch an “unclean” Sunni, 38 senior Saudi clerics issued a call to arms in defence of Iraq against the “Crusader-Safavid-Rejectionist plot” that seeks to uproot Sunni Islam.
Such alarmism reflects, to a degree, a desire by the Sunni, American-allied governments of countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to staunch what they see as a rising tide of Iranian influence. The capture of power by Iraq’s long-oppressed Shias is perceived as having, for the first time in history, removed the main Arab bulwark against Persian expansion. Much as most loathed Saddam Hussein, the style and timing of his execution, on a day celebrated by Sunnis as their main annual feast, smacked to many of an ugly Shia triumphalism. Iran’s wider assumption of leadership for Islamist “resistance” movements, underscored by the electoral success of Hamas and by Hizbullah’s spirited fight in last summer’s war with Israel, gives Arab leaders even worse jitters.
http://www.economist.com/images/20070203/CMA981.gif
At the same time, their American ally is demanding support for its policy of boxing in Iran. Unable to lend much material weight to America’s efforts, fearful of a negative backlash should America actually strike Iran, and unwilling to be seen as acting in Israel’s interest, Arab countries appear to have chosen to exploit sectarian feelings to send a shot across Iran’s bows.
With typical circumlocution, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recently said as much. “We have advised them not to expose the region to dangers,” he said, declining to name the country to which he referred. “We don’t interfere in anyone’s affairs, [but] any state which resorts to unwise acts must bear the responsibility in front of the other countries in the region.”
Bark against the arc
The Saudi intent to thwart Iran’s regional ambitions is clearest in Lebanon. The kingdom has lent strong financial and diplomatic support to the government of the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, whose coalition of Sunni, Druze and some Christian parties has been deadlocked in a duel with a grouping headed by Hizbullah. But what has squeezed the Shia party most is loss of the stature it recently gained among a wider Arab public. Seen last summer as the vanguard of the struggle against Israel, it is now viewed by many Sunnis as little more than a cat’s paw for Iran.
As Iraq’s agony has made clear, sectarianism is a dangerous genie. It was with a view to cooling recent excesses that Qatar, a rich Gulf emirate, invited some 400 top Sunni and Shia religious figures to a dialogue last month. In the event, rhetoric at the conference proved embarrassingly hot. Iran’s chief delegate, Ayatollah Muhammad Taskhiri, was besieged with accusations. Iran was failing to stop the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunnis, he was told. It persecuted its own Sunni minority. Its agents were trying to convert Sunnis and spread Shia texts that insult historic figures revered by Sunnis. Why, retorted Shia delegates, did Sunni clerics so rarely condemn the slaughter of Iraq’s Shias? And what of the disenfranchised Shia minorities in Sunni countries?
A message from a senior Lebanese Shia cleric, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, provided a useful cold shower. If Sunnis and Shias did not cease their wrangling, he said, Muslims would end up turning to secularism as their saviour.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
You are against human execution by another human and at the same time want to line up some humans and shoot them in head??? I am wondering you are one of those extremists yourself 
. Anyway, sectarian violence in Pak is not that bad and whatever tension we’ve is largely due to Indians and Iranians.. they have so many jasoos (spies) in Imam baragh that you can’t even imagine… RAW and crazy ayatollahs from other side are working day and night to destabilize Pakistan.
Re: Sectarian tension and Pakistan
Better equipment will help but, I do not believe improved gear will solve this problem. Pakistan never had an upper hand when it came to sectarian violence, be it Shia Sunni and/or other. There is something deeper than a “CSI type investigation”. I do not think our intelligence is weak in ground work, they are pretty well dug in Pakistan, but still these groups continue to carry out their horrific crimes against innocent Pakistanis.
Since 9/11 attack, their assault have taken a new turn, suicide bombs and we still do not know who they are and why they have such strong control in Pakistan?
