The Democracy That Is Nuclear Pakistan

"The rising instability and militant attacks provide a window to all militant organizations, including ISKP [branch of Islamic State centred in Afghanistan], to ramp up their attacks."

"These attacks on police, political rallies and security forces have ended the brief illusion of peace in Pakistan."

Zahid Hussain, political analyst

 

"People were chanting 'God is Great' as the leaders arrived."

"[I was standing outside the tent] and that was when I heard the deafening sound of the bomb."

Khan Mohammad, local resident

Relatives and mourners carry the casket of a victim killed in Sunday's suicide bombing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Photograph: Mohammad Sajjad/AP

Violent Islamists have long made a comfortable home for themselves in Pakistan. It is where Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda was given safe haven at Abbottabad, when U.S. troops in Afghanistan were searching for his whereabouts after the mastermind of the 9/11 events publicly celebrated its success. Masquerading as a 'partner' with the West in the campaign against terrorism, Pakistan's military and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency founded, trained and equipped the Afghanistan Taliban, recognized universally as a terrorist group.

Pakistan's leaders appear to have overlooked the growing militancy of its own Taliban in the process of supporting one that would eventually misrule its neighbour. The tribal villages in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan are a never-ending source of vibrant, violent extremism, and a threat to Pakistan itself necessitating that the Pakistan military engage in battles as the tribal extremists made an effort to extend their territory, endangering nearby nuclear weapons depots.

From Pakistan, a terrorist group of extremist Islamists infiltrated and attacked Indian Mumbai in a bloody four-day assault and massacre that succeeded in killing over 160 people, by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) or Army of the Pure, in November of 2008. The country is a breeding ground for terrorist groups. And now the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the latest suicide bombing that killed 56 people attending an election rally for a pro-Taliban cleric.

The bombing took place in Bajur, wounding close to two hundred people, killing at least five children. A reflection of tribal/sectarian antipathies between Islamist groups, present in Kyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bordering Afghanistan. The ISIL group targeted the Jamiat Ulema Islam party whose chief is cleric and politician Fazlur Rehman, with ties to both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

An estimated thousand people were crowded within a tent near a market, for a rally preparatory to fall elections. Khan Mohammad, a local resident who stood outside the tent and witnessed the aftereffects of the bomb blast, stated later that he had heard people crying for help. Minutes afterward, ambulances arrived to begin evacuating the hundreds of wounded people.

 

An ambulance is set to transport injured people after a bomb explosion in the Bajur district of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday. (Rescue 1122 emergency service/The Associated Press)

 Investigating police knew well before the statement implicating the Islamic State in the carnage, that an initial investigation led them to believe that the regional affiliate of Islamic State, a Taliban rival, would be the likeliest source to have been involved. This, despite that a Pakistani security analyst pointed to factions that had broken off from the Pakistani Taliban as possible suspects, instead. Pakistan does not lack for any number of viral, vicious Islamist terror groups; they find their natural home there.

By Monday funerals were taking place for the dead. Local customs mandate that female relatives and children at their family homes, cry out loudly in their grief, while beating their chests in anguish. Hundreds of men gathered around to follow caskets to mosques and open areas for funeral prayers and then to trek into the hills for burial services in rituals as old as time itself.

Those that could be treated for relatively light wounds sustained in the blast were released from hospital while the critically wounded were transported to the provincial capital of Peshawar by army helicopters. Some critically wounded people died while in hospital and it is expected that the death count may yet climb again as more succumb to their grievous wounds.

A worker inspects the scene of the explosion in the Bajur district of northwest Pakistan on Sunday. (Rescue 1122 emergency service/The Associated Press)

What Goes Around Comes Around

"Panic spread among the worshippers when the firing started. I ran to save my life."

"Suddenly a man came in and started firing... He shot many people [and] then closed his eyes and blew himself up."

"After that, I have no idea what happened."

Hospitalized Pakistani worshipper at Shi'ite Peshawar mosque

Soldiers inspect the mosque after Friday's bomb blast in Peshawar. (Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty Images)

 

The death toll of 58 Shi'ite worshippers last Friday at a Peshawar mosque is likely to rise, according to police, given that among the 194 that had been wounded in the attack, many were in critical condition. The suicidal attacker is among the dead. It had not immediately been confirmed who was responsible for the attack. The Pakistani Taliban claim they were not involved, and initially no other group had come forward to boast of the attack.

Pakistan's Shi'ites have long been under threat by the Sunni majority, targeted by Muslim Islamist militants; Islamic State and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. In a sense, this deadly sectarian conflict can be laid at the responsibility of Saudi Arabia whose Wahhabist sect of puritanical Islam, dating back centuries and more recently renewed, was spread, courtesy of Saudi oil money that enabled the building of madrasas built everywhere in the Muslim world and beyond.

Students attending such schools are taught the fundamentals of 'pure' Islam, in which the concept of violent jihad is considered one of the pillars of Islam, an obligation of all true faithful of Islam to engage. One of the better-known, modern day illuminati of the Wahhabist school of Islamism none other than Osama bin Laden. The targeted mosque was the sole place of worship for Pakistani Shi'ites in the old city of Peshawar.

"We are in a state of emergency and the injured are being shifted to the hospital", disclosed police officer Mohammad Sajjan Khan. Wahhabist Islam considers Shi'ism to be false Islam and those who practise it, no more and no less practising apostasy. Jihad is directed to destroy their lives since they are regarded as opponents not supporters of Islam. 

 

An armed assassin arrived at the mosque on a motorcycle. He fired at police when he was stopped, then forced his way into the mosque hall crowded with the faithful, began firing, and finally detonated his suicide vest. Prior to entering the mosque the attacker shot at police guards standing at the entrance to the mosque, killing one. Police had the impression there were two men involved, initially. 

 

An injured man sits on a stretcher in Peshawar, after a bomb blast in a mosque during Friday prayers. (Khuram Parvez/Reuters)

There is deadly irony in this situation in Pakistan. While ostensibly a partner in the global war against terrorism, Pakistan's Inter-Intelligence Agency trained and armed the Afghan Taliban which found haven inside Pakistan's mountainous regions bordering Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to roust Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda whom the Taliban were sheltering in Afghanistan. 

 

Bin Laden himself was eventually domiciled in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his compound located near a Pakistani military garrison, where US special forces eventually caught up with him.

And while surreptitiously Pakistan, through its military was aiding and abetting the Afghan Taliban, in their own Islamist mountain tribal communities their own Taliban sprang up. The Pakistani Taliban became a threat the government of Pakistan had to reckon with, and still attempts to clamp down on. Although a unit of Islamic State eventually claimed it was involved in the suicide attack, it is entirely likely it was indeed the work of the Pakistani Taliban.

With the ascension to power in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban have emboldened the activities of the Pakistani Taliban. And they have launched attacks into Pakistan from the safe haven that Afghanistan has now become for them, despite that the Afghan Taliban had publicly vowed that the country they once again govern will never become a launching pad for terrorist attacks against their neighbours. 

 

Which was precisely what Pakistan had been from 2001 forward. Now, is is the government of Pakistan that has appealed to the governing Afghan Taliban to hand over any Pakistani Taliban on their soil who launch attacks into Pakistan. So far, none have been.

Rescue workers and volunteers gather at the site of bomb explosion in Peshawar, Pakistan, Friday, March 4, 2022. A powerful bomb exploded inside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Friday, killing more than 30 worshippers and wounding dozens more, many of them critically, police said. (AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)

Forensic officers at Liverpool Women's hospital on Tuesday. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

"He first came to the cathedral in August 2015 and wanted to convert to Christianity. He took an Alpha course, which explains the Christian faith, and completed it in November of that year."

"That enabled him to come to an informed decision and he changed from Islam to Christianity and was confirmed as a Christian by at least March 2017, just before he came to live with us."

"He was destitute at that time and we took him in."

Christian volunteer Malcolm Hitchcott, Liverpool.

 

"[Searches are under way at the Rutland Avenue address and a second address in Sutcliffe Street, where al-Swealmeen previously lived, and where] significant items [had been recovered]."

"We continue to appeal for any information about this incident and now that we have released his name any information that the public may have about al-Swealmeen, no matter how small, may be of great assistance to us."

Counter Terrorism Policing North West

He had converted to Christianity, at a cathedral hard by a Liverpool maternity hospital, where he was blown to smithereens, ostensibly in a premature explosion of his own suicide-plan explosives. He had arrived in the United Kingdom from Iraq, an asylum seeker, and at age 32 decided, it would appear, that the asylum and his conversion were not really what he wanted out of life. What he wanted, it seems, was an honourable death-by-martyrdom as a jihadist through a terrorist attack on those who had taken him in.

 

The explosive device he was carrying, seated in the back of a taxi detonated outside Liverpool Women's Hospital on Remembrance Sunday. He was to have been dropped off at the hospital after the taxi picked him up at what the police now suspect was his 'bomb factory' in the Sefton area of Liverpool. Police feel it to have been more likely that his penultimate destination was the Liverpool Cathedral where he was confirmed in 2017.

 

Hundreds of people, along with military veterans and civic dignitaries had gathered for a Remembrance Sunday service at the cathedral. There is much speculation but though police have announced this to have been an act of terrorism, the motivation is not yet clear,while it might seem obvious to some. It is debatable whether he remained a 'practising' Christian, or had returned to his original Islamic faith by the time he planned his act of terrorism.

Clearly, showing up armed for a suicide attack indicates he planned to take as many lives as possible among those who had gathered for the Remembrance Day ceremony. It was  his ill fortune and a heavenly host that denied him his martyrdom plan when his explosives blew up prematurely, denying him the celebrity he obviously sought.

What his act did succeed in producing was the terror threat in the U.K. whose level was 'substantial' being raised to 'severe' indicating that another attack may be likely to occur, just weeks following the murder of a Conservative Member of Parliament in Essex, in another terrorist stabbing death. Britons, declared their prime minister would never be "cowed by terrorism".

"We will never give in to those who seek to divide us with senseless acts of violence", said Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Concern over a possible Christmas bombing campaign, warned a former counter-terror chief, could conceivably be behind raising the threat level to severe. "It is almost certainly linked to Christmas. This could be the first of several. It is hard to believe it is a one-off", the former Scotland Yard commander stated.

A security source ventured that the explosive device was likely built with the use of Triacetone triperoxide, the substance used in the Manchester Arena suicide bomb that took place in 2017. The thinking is that the man inexpertly triggered the explosion when he tried to connect the detonator to the charge.

A photo of Emad al-Swealmeen posted on Hitchcott’s Facebook. Photograph: Malcolm Hitchcott/Facebook