Pakistan’s Hazaras fear for their lives
QUETTA (Pakistan): Crowded into “ghettos” surrounded by armed checkpoints, Pakistan’s Shia Hazara minority say they are being slaughtered by sectarian militants in the southwestern city here, with authorities seemingly unable to halt the killings.
For years, hundreds of thousands of the Shia community’s members have been hemmed into two separate enclaves cordoned off by numerous checkpoints and hundreds of armed guards designed to protect the minority from violent militants.
“It’s like a prison here,” said Bostan Ali, a Hazara activist, about conditions inside the enclaves. The Hazaras are experiencing mental torture,” he added, complaining that the community has been effectively “cut off from the rest of the city” and “confined” to such areas.
The Shia community’s presence is particularly strong here — the uneasy capital of impoverished Balochistan province where sectarian violence, suicide bombings, and banditry are common.
Hazaras are technically free to roam around here at their will, but few do, fearing attacks.
To further protect the group, day traders and market vendors are given armed escorts when they leave their neighbourhoods, while ongoing military operations are said to be targeting militants in the restive province.
But even these measures have proven inept at stopping major attacks on Hazaras.
Just last month a bombing at a vegetable market left 21 dead and 47 more wounded — with the majority of the victims identified as Hazara.
The incident is all the more disturbing considering the group was under the protection of Pakistani paramilitary forces, who failed to stop the suicide bomber from detonating in the crowd.
The attack — claimed by the Islamic State and its local antiShia affiliate Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — is just the latest in a long series of assaults targeting the group, including back-to-back bombings in early 2013 that killed nearly 200 of its members.
The situation across the border in Afghanistan is equally if not more dangerous, with Hazara mosques, schools, and community events regularly attacked by insurgents.
Pakistan has long been a cauldron of unrest and sectarian violence, with the officially Islamic Republic home to myriad sects of Islam and religious minorities that have been targeted by violent extremists for decades.