Pakistan's Travails
"When we first heard that there had been a blast, we started to call him,""The phone was ringing out which initially gave us hope. But when we asked the police, they told us that he had been killed. The fourth body I saw was his.""He was kind-hearted, friendly, ready to help others. He was also brave, he was never afraid of anything. We always used to tell him to be careful, but he used to reply: 'No, it's my duty'. It is a huge loss to our family."Muhammed Zahid, brother of Irfan Ullah, a police inspector killed in the explosion"Terrorists want to create fear by targeting those who perform the duty of defending Pakistan,""[The government will respond with] stern action [against the perpetrators behind this bombing].""The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan,"\"[Condolences to the families of the victims, their pain] cannot be described in words."Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif
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| Police inspector Irfan Ullah, whose funeral gathered hundreds, had a wife and five children |
Pakistan is in mourning. A deep and sweeping national day of black despair in the wake of an inexplicably vicious plan to kill, and kill they did. All it takes is one person willing to sacrifice himself for the greater glory of a cause passionately believed and pursued. The target was a crowded mosque located within a police compound in Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday. When the suicide bomber set off his explosives the blast succeeded in collapsing the roof, creating an enormous death count of over a hundred people.
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| People and rescue workers gather to look for survivors under a collapsed roof after a suicide blast in a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Monday. (Fayaz Aziz/Reuters) |
The police inspector for whom hundreds of Pakistanis came out to honour him at his funeral, had escaped death just a short while ago, in an earlier such event. This is an area of the world where residents must live with the certainty that sooner or later a violent event will occur and if they are unfortunate they will lose their lives. This is a feeling well known to Jews in Israel, to the people of Ukraine under the Russian invasion.
In Pakistan's case, the threat has arisen from a fundamentalist version of Islam intent on wresting government control to enable them to achieve their goal of transforming the country into a pure Islamist state. A country which has laws against blasphemy, laws against persuading Muslims to adopt a different religion, laws against taking the name of the Prophet in vain; criminal infractions that can be punished by a death penalty.
The carnage meted out in Pakistan on Monday led to the death of over 100 people with another 150 wounded, some critically. Under the rubble of the mosque that held some 300 worshippers that day, with more people planning to enter, rescue workers are finding more bodies, swelling the horrendous toll. Most of the dead were police officers. It is a conundrum how the attacker could have entered the compound.
This is a walled compound housing police headquarters in Peshawar in the northwest of the country. The compound is located within a high-security zone, along with other government buildings. A commander for the Pakistani Taliban, Sarbakaf Mohmand, claimed responsibility for the atrocity. Majority Sunni Muslim Pakistan helped form the Taliban, the Pakistani Secret Service nurtured the Afghan Taliban, trained and armed it and gave it shelter when the US-led NATO-UN mission to oust the Taliban from Kabul in its search for al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden led to a protracted occupation.
Now, the Afghan Taliban have returned to government in Afghanistan, an event partially orchestrated by Pakistan. Pakistan's meddling in Afghanistan has not been without a cost to its own security. For decades Islamist fundamentalists have battled with the government, one administration after another. Tereek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a close ally of the Afghan Taliban, simply want for their country what the Afghan Taliban have achieved in theirs.
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| A wounded policeman is treated at a government hospital. (Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images) |
At a hospital near the mosque and police complex the wounded are being treated, many of whom may not survive their ordeal. According to the Taliban commander Mohmand, one of their fighters launched the attack as vengeance for the killing of one of their commanders last year. The Afghan Taliban government responded to the mass killing, its Foreign Ministry stating it was "saddened to learn that numerous people lost their lives and many others were injured by an explosion at a mosque in Peshawar".
Pointing out in an exquisite display of sanctimony that they condemned attacks on worshippers as being contrary to the teachings of Islam. This all comes at a time of great national emergencies in Pakistan which is suffering deep financial disarray.The country is
still contending with unprecedented flooding that killed 1,739 people,
destroyed over two million homes, and at one point submerged up to a third of the country in floodwaters.
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| A police contingent serve as an honour guard during a funeral of police officers who were killed in the Peshawar mosque suicide bombing, in this photo released by Pakistan's Police Department. (Pakistan Police Department/The Associated Press) |
Labels: Carnage, Death and Destruction, Islamist Fundamentalism, Pakistan Taliban, Peshawar Bombing, Suicide bombing in Mosque
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 01, 2023
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