Posted on 12/07/2012 12:46:55 AM PST by Cronos
In the days leading up to the religious holiday of Ashura, leading members of the Pakistani Shia community in Pakistan received anonymous text messages warning of violence to come: "Kill, Kill, Shia".
In recent years,Ashura - has become an annual flashpoint in Pakistan's increasingly sectarian and violent religious culture.
.., this year's Ashura in Pakistan signified a continuation of the country's spiral into self-destructive communal violence
A suicide bomber in the city of Rawalpindi hurled a grenade into the midst of a Shia procession before detonating his vest and killing 23 people, while other attacks throughout the country from Karachi to Dera Ismail Khan claimed the lives of dozens more.
The attacks were claimed by Pakistani Taliban (TTP) militants who denounced the victims as "blasphemers" and stated they were engaged in a "war of belief" with Shias - stating further that attacks against them would continue until they, in their millions, were wiped out of the country.
That the fanatical nihilism of terrorist attacks against public religious ceremonies - ceremonies which have been observed since the country's founding - has become normalised and routine is a sign of the depths to which Pakistan has sunk in terms of sectarianism and social fragmentation over the past decade.
they comprise roughly 20 per cent of the population and count the nation's founder as one of their own, Shia Muslims within Pakistan have become a community under siege in recent years and are facing a situation which is increasingly being described by many Pakistanis as a slow-motion genocide.
Several hundred Pakistani Shias have been killed this year alone in increasingly high-profile attacks by extremist militants, including one incident caught on video in August in which passengers were forced off a bus in the Gilgit region and executed by armed militants who checked their victims' ID cards before killing whomsoever they could identify as being Shia.
It is believed that since the early 1990s, nearly 4,000 Pakistani Shias have been murdered in sectarian attacks, and at a pace which has rapidly accelerated in recent years...
Ahmadis, Barelvis, Christians and Hindus have all become subject to persecution within an increasingly religiously-chauvinistic Pakistani society, but it is Shias who have suffered the highest toll of bloodshed and whose fate is most tied to external forces intent on using Pakistan as a battleground for broader regional conflicts.
In an interview given to Reuters, Malik Ishaq, the leader of one of Pakistan's most notorious anti-Shia extremist groups Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) declared Shia Muslims "the greatest infidels on earth" and demanded that the Pakistani state "declare Shia non-Muslims on the basis of their beliefs".
One lower-level LeJ operative now in police custody, Mahmoud Baber, reportedly choked with pride and emotion while describing to reporters his "great satisfaction" at being involved in 14 murders over his militant career, saying of the organisations purpose: "Get rid of Shias. That is our goal. May God help us".
What mozzies mean by martyrdom is funny -- this guy was a would-be usurper who tried to take over the Ummah and died fighting. So he's a "martyr" to the Shias...
they comprise roughly 20 per cent of the population and count the nation's founder as one of their own, Shia Muslims within Pakistan have become a community under siege in recent years and are facing a situation which is increasingly being described by many Pakistanis as a slow-motion genocide.
It is believed that since the early 1990s, nearly 4,000 Pakistani Shias have been murdered in sectarian attacks, and at a pace which has rapidly accelerated in recent years.
Sunni-Shia violence hotting up....
They deserve each other.
you betcha. Cutting themselves
Worldwide phenomenon that has never been restricted to just Shia.
Is there any more proof needed that islam is a mental disease?
We really need to just nuke the moslem world. We’ll have to do it eventually, may as well get it over with now.
Maybe we should stoke this fire?
‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Ah-sura!’
...just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
The Wahabbis, as reformers preached a return to the early days of Islam, to "pure" Islam, just as Christian reformers did -- the difference being that in the case of Christianity, the CORE of Christianity is peace and Godliness, while the CORE of Islam is what we see in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban
These are not extremists, but reformers
The Sauds fought against the Turks, believing the Turks to not be "pure" enough.
Sadly, this was aided by the English who gave the SAuds the ability to defeat the Turks and then with their oil money to spread reformed Islam (Salafism/Wahabbism) to the rest of the world, founding madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan (destroying Sufis -- they still blow up sufi mosques and places of worship there and Sufis ARE Sunni, not Shia) and Indonesia and Chechnya and Nigeria etc. etc.
The Shia Hizbullah and Iran are supplying the "somewhat Shia" Alawite regime of Assad.
Why are we getting involved in this? Let the Iranis and Saudis fight their war with their proxies.
This has already formed a wedge between Hamas and Hizbullah
We should not get involved in this at all, at the most to safeguard the 10% of Syria who are christians
Indeed...we should be protecting the 10% of Syrians who are Christians (as well as the 10% of Egyptians) from genocide by the majority.
Did we not do that in the former Yugoslavia?
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