Spiral of killings widens Pakistan sectarian divide
Tit-for-tat murders in Karachi
KARACHI, Feb 25, (RTRS): When Aurangzeb Farooqi survived an attempt on his life that left six of his bodyguards dead and a six-inch bullet wound in his thigh, the Pakistani cleric lost little time in turning the narrow escape to his advantage.
Recovering in hospital after the ambush on his convoy in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, the radical Sunni Muslim ideologue was composed enough to exhort his followers to close ranks against the city’s Shiites.
“Enemies should listen to this: my task now is Sunni awakening,” Farooqi said in remarks captured on video shortly after a dozen gunmen opened fire on his doublecabin pick-up truck on Dec 25.
“I will make Sunnis so powerful against Shiites that no Sunni will even want to shake hands with a Shi’ite,” he said, propped up in bed on emergency-room pillows. “They will die their own deaths, we won’t have to kill them.”
Chills
Such is the kind of speech that chills members of Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority, braced for a new chapter of persecution following a series of bombings that have killed almost 200 people in the city of Quetta since the beginning of the year.
While the Quetta carnage grabbed world attention, a Reuters inquiry into a lesser known spate of murders in Karachi, a much bigger conurbation, suggests the violence is taking on a volatile new dimension as a small number of Shiites fight back.
Pakistan’s Western allies have traditionally been fixated on the challenge posed to the brittle, nuclear-armed state by Taleban militants battling the army in the bleakly spectacular highlands on the Afghan frontier.
But a cycle of tit-for-tat killings on the streets of Karachi points to a new type of threat: a campaign by Lashkare-Jhangvi (LeJ) and allied Pakistani anti-Shi’ite groups to rip open sectarian fault-lines in the city of 18 million people.
Police suspect LeJ, which claimed responsibility for the Quetta blasts, and its sympathisers may also be the driving force behind the murder of more than 80 Shiites in Karachi in the past six months, including doctors, bankers and teachers.
In turn, a number of hardline Sunni clerics who share Farooqi’s suspicion of the Shi’ite sect have been killed in drive-by shootings or barely survived apparent revenge attacks. Dozens of Farooqi’s followers have also been shot dead.
Discerning the motives for any one killing is murky work in Karachi, where multiple armed factions are locked in a perpetual all-against-all turf war, but detectives suspect an emerging Shi’ite group known as the Mehdi Force is behind some of the attacks on Farooqi’s men.
While beleaguered secularists and their Western friends hope Pakistan will mature into a more confident democracy at general elections due in May, the spiral of killings in Karachi, a microcosm of the country’s diversity, suggests the polarising forces of intolerance are gaining ground.
“The divide is getting much bigger between Shia and Sunni. You have to pick sides now,” said Sundus Rasheed, who works at a radio station in Karachi. “I’ve never experienced this much hatred in Pakistan.”
Once the proud wearer of a silver Shi’ite amulet her mother gave her to hang around her neck, Rasheed now tucks away the charm, fearing it might serve not as protection, but mark her as a target.
Fully recovered from the assassination attempt, Farooqi can be found in the cramped upstairs office of an Islamic seminary tucked in a sidestreet in Karachi’s gritty Landhi neighbourhood, an industrial zone in the east of the city.
On a rooftop shielded by a corrugated iron canopy, dozens of boys wearing skull caps sit cross-legged on prayer mats, imbibing a strict version of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam that inspires both Farooqi and the foot-soldiers of LeJ.
“We say Shias are infidels. We say this on the basis of reason and arguments,” Farooqi, a wiry, intense man with a wispy beard and cascade of shoulderlength curls, told Reuters. “I want to be called to the Supreme Court so that I can prove using their own books that they are not Muslims.”
Farooqi, who cradled bejewelled prayer beads as he spoke, is the Karachi head of a Deobandi organisation called Ahle Sunnat wal Jama’at. That is the new name for Sipah-eSahaba Pakistan, a forerunner banned in 2002 in a wider crackdown on militancy by Pakistan’s then army ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.
Farooqi says he opposes violence and denies any link to LeJ, but security officials believe his supporters are broadly aligned with the heavily armed group, whose leaders deem murdering Shiites an act of piety.
In the past year, LeJ has prosecuted its campaign with renewed gusto, emboldened by the release of Malik Ishaq, one of its founders, who was freed after spending 14 years in jail in July, 2011. Often pictured wearing a celebratory garland of pink flowers, Ishaq has since appeared at gatherings of supporters in Karachi and other cities.
Diverse
In diverse corners of Pakistan, LeJ’s cadres have bombed targets from mosques to snooker halls; yanked passengers off buses and shot them, and posted a video of themselves beheading a pair of trussed-up captives with a knife.
Nobody knows exactly how many Shiites there are in Pakistan — estimates ranging from four to 20 percent of the population of 180 million underscore the uncertainty. What is clear is that they are dying faster than ever. At least 400 were killed last year, many from the ethnic Hazara minority in Quetta, according to Human Rights Watch, and some say the figure is far higher.
Pakistani officials suspect regional powers are stoking the fire, with donors in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-dominated Gulf countries funding LeJ, while Shi’ite organisations turn to Iran.
Whatever factors are driving the violence, the state’s ambivalent response has raised questions over the degree of tolerance for LeJ by elements in the security establishment, which has a long history of nurturing Deobandi proxies.
Under pressure in the wake of the Quetta bombings, police arrested Ishaq at his home in the eastern Punjab province on Friday under a colonial-era public order law.
But in Karachi, Farooqi and his thousands of followers project a new aura of confidence. Crowds of angry men chant “Shia infidel! Shia infidel” at rallies and burn effigies while clerics pour scorn on the sect from mosque loudspeakers after Friday prayers. A rash of graffiti hails Farooqi as a saviour.
Over glasses of milky tea, he explained that his goal was to convince the government to declare Shiites non-Muslims, as it did to the Ahmadiyya sect in 1974, as a first step towards ostracizing the community and banning a number of their books.