The growing terrorist threat in Pakistan and Afghanistan is blamed on the Pakistani political-military establishment’s encouragement of terror groups that are amenable to its guidance and support.
PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN HAVE IN RECENT weeks and months witnessed a wave of terrorist incidents in which hundreds of people died. Most of the attacks have been the handiwork of the Islamic State (Daesh) and point to the fact that the lethal terrorist group has sprung roots in the subcontinent. The Daesh was quick to claim responsibility for the suicide attack on the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, an 800-year-old Sufi shrine situated in Sindh province in Pakistan, in the third week of February, in which more than 80 worshippers, among them 20 women and eight children, were killed.
The last big attack on a Sufi shrine was in November last year when a suicide bomber struck at the shrine of Shah Norani in Balochistan province. Sufism is considered un-Islamic by the hard-line Sunni outfits that spearhead terror in the region. Terror groups such as the Daesh consider Sufis apostates on a par with the frequently targeted Shia minority.
In the week before the attack in Sindh province, four terror attacks took place on Pakistani soil. On February 13, a suicide bomber targeted a peaceful rally outside the State Assembly in Lahore, killing 13 people and injuring at least 85. Two days later, a suicide bomber targeted a government compound. The next day there was an improvised explosive device (IED) attack on a military convoy. A breakaway group of the Pakistani Taliban calling itself the Jamaat-ul-Ahraar (JuA) claimed credit for all the attacks. The Pakistani government had previously claimed that the back of the militants had been broken after the military operation “Zarb-i-Azb” in 2014 to flush out the militants in the tribal areas. The current upsurge in violence has been the worst since terrorist attacks peaked three years ago.
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