Army nurtured them as its proxy warriors and then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence – by Khaled Ahmed
Pakistan Army nurtures and protects the Deobandi-Wahhabi Jihadis as its proxy warriors.
Related post: Silence of Pakistan army generals on Shia genocide – by Feisal Naqvi
Today, Shiite Muslims are most target killed faith group in Pakistan’s entire history. According to an estimate, at least 19,000 Shia have been killed due to their faith/sect so far in what can be described as a slow-motion genocide. The very terrorists who are killing Shiiites have also killed thousands of Sunni Barelvis and dozens of Ahmadis, Christians and moderate Deobandis to enforce their narrow Jihadi-sectarian views on others.
The Shia are being killed all over Pakistan like lambs at the slaughter house without much disturbance among the Sunni community which leans on anti-Americanism to favour the Taliban and their ancillary warriors originally prepared by the Army against India.
The Shia are not named as a minority in the national census but are informally considered to be nearly 30 percent of the total population. A storm is brewing against them in the Middle East, and Pakistan could be considered as a country where it all began with the help of the state of Pakistan which nurtured the Shia-hating Deobandis and allowed its personnel in the intelligence agencies handling the covert war to be reverse-indoctrinated.
The al Qaeda-linked Lashkar Jhangvi (LeJ, currently operating as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat ASWJ) in August 2012 published a gruesome video on jihadist internet showing the beheading of two Shia. In a statement that accompanied the video on one of the forums (Jamia Hafsa), a jihadist said Lashkar Jhangvi is part of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Two of the Lashkar fighters then pulled out knives, and proceeded to behead the Shia men. The victims’ heads were then placed on their laps. The warriors wiped their knives on the clothes of the slain men.
Lashkar claimed that ‘most of the operations against the Shia in Pakistan, if not all of them, are carried out by this group’. It said that Lashkar was the Omar Brigade of Taliban-Pakistan as the Omar Brigade of al Qaeda targeted Badr Brigade and others among the Shia.
The politicians turn their face away; the judges are scared of the clerical backlash. Pakistan as a state is decaying and is eating its minorities first. Before it becomes a pre-modern hell under Al Qaeda and its followers, it has to accomplish the task begun with the decimation of the Shia: it will eat its Sunni Muslims too. The Jihad-trained Deobandi-Wahhabi Muslims are much more powerful, well equipped than the impoverished Sunni Barelvi community. For the non-Muslims it is a prison from which there is no escape.
Pakistan was always dicey with its minorities because of its ideology, but today it is killing its Muslim and non-Muslim minorities because it is killing itself as a state. The people who have undertaken this destruction have originated in the state of the Muslim mind today across the Islamic world, but their midwife in Pakistan was the Army which nurtured them as the state’s proxy warriors and then surrendered to them its monopoly of violence.
Source: Adapted and edited from The Friday Times
Speaking on the occasion, security analyst Imtiaz Gul said that the killing of Shia Muslims was threatening the very foundations of Pakistan. He said that political actors and the state were more interested in political mileage rather than curbing the killings. He claimed that there was a “radical mindset” within the judiciary and bureaucracy that provides protection and patronage to extremist outfits. He cited examples in which land allocated to green belts in Islamabad, was being handed over to seminaries and mosques despite the fact that legally no construction was permitted on that land. “Until we are able to finish the culture of protecting and patronizing the groups involved in spreading sectarian hatred, we will not be able to end the growing levels of faith-based violence in Pakistan,” he said.
Another speaker, Dr Ayesha Siddiqa, pointed out the weakness of the state in preventing the killings of Shias. “The State’s capacity to manage policing and public prosecution departments in an effective way was a key issue in Shia killings,” she said, urging for the empowerment of law enforcement agencies so they could take on powerful armed groups responsible for sectarian violence. She further said that the civil society in Pakistan should engage with Islamic jurisprudence and discourse and find inherent messages of peace and pluralism in order to change public mindset on the issue of sectarianism, violence, terrorism and militancy.
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2012/08/31/news/national/pakistan-threatened-by-religious-sectarian-violence/