[Pakistani] Army repels raid; suicide bombing rocks Parachinar

ISLAMABAD, Aug 4: Fresh violence left 23 people, four of them soldiers, dead on Saturday in the tribal areas. The military said militants fired a barrage of rockets at security checkpoints and then attacked one of them with automatic weapons overnight in North Waziristan.

“The miscreants fired 50 to 60 rockets at five posts before attacking one of them with automatic weapons in Dosali,” military spokesman Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad told AFP.

Fierce fighting ensued and the troops repelled the attackers, killing 10 militants, he said, adding that four soldiers also died in the battle.

In Parachinar, Kurram Agency, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a taxi stand, killing nine civilians. Several cars and shops were damaged in the attack.

Local administration official Sahibzada Anis said the bomber probably detonated his payload prematurely after he had a roadside accident with another car near the taxi stand on a main road in the town.

“He detonated himself after the accident fearing he could be arrested,” Mr Anis said, adding that authorities had ordered an investigation into the attack.

Local official Mujtaba Asghar said the blast damaged several vehicles and five shops.

“Human limbs and pieces of flesh were scattered around the site,” witness Mohammad Sajjad said.

A senior doctor at Parachinar’s main government hospital, Hanif Jan, said nine people were killed and 35 wounded, some critically.

“Five people died on the spot while four died in the hospital,” Mr Jan said, adding that two critically wounded people had been moved to a hospital in Peshawar.

Officials said the violence triggered by the July 10 killing of Red Mosque cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi in an army raid in Islamabad had claimed more than 230 lives. Interior ministry officials said there had been at least 13 suicide attacks since the operation.

Inter-Services Public Relations said in a statement that army troops had been deployed in Parachinar for assistance to local administration in maintaining law and order in the area. It said the step had been taken on requisition by the district administration.

FC personnel had found suspicious material stuffed in a pressure cooker near the old Custom House, about 16km away from the city, during patrolling .The bomb disposal squad defused the explosive material weighing 10kg. Police also found and defused 15kg of explosives in a gas cylinder at a distance of 300m from the place.—AFP/APP

The radical loser (Long Read)
Der Spiegel ^ | 1/12/05 | Hans Magnus Enzensberger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1694568/posts

(snip)
Left” or “Right”, it makes no odds. Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of “the masses”. Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either; any concern for survival is foreign to them. And this applies equally to their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing, shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in the area with a bed or a scalpel – for they have trouble distinguishing between mutilation and self-mutilation.

(snip)

There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma, and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.

The movement’s list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.

(snip)

Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of “collateral damage”. In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.

The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.

(snip)

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