Another day of bloodshed

Like Fridays before it, this Friday, February 1, too was marred by the most terrible violence. The day, of course, has been selected time and again by militants, because it is a time when worshippers gather at mosques to mark the day — and thus become an easy target for those out to kill. Their aim is terrifyingly simple: to claim as many lives as possible and create the maximum degree of terror. Time and again they succeed.

They certainly succeeded in Hangu, the principal town of the district by the same name in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where a suicide bomber, aged according to the police around 22 years, drove into a busy market area and detonated some seven kilogrammes of explosives outside a mosque used by Shias.

This then was another sectarian attack. Among the 24 dead were, however, 22 Sunnis whose mosque lay adjacent to the one targeted, as well as three policemen. The scenes described after the attack resembled, according to eyewitnesses, some vision from hell, with blood spattered all around and bodies lying on the road, many of them already dead. Some 50 were injured in the blast and are currently lying in various hospitals.



Sectarianism is a huge reality in our country. Attacks motivated by it have taken place in Hangu before, as they have in other places. Their intensity seems to be growing by the week, by the month, by the year. The question that comes to mind is why nothing is done. It is, after all, not so hard to stop sectarianism, or at the very least reduce its ferocity. Everyone knows who the groups behind such killings are. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is possibly the first one that comes to mind when Shias are killed.

It should not be impossible to go after this group and its leaders. Many of them are figures who are known in their areas and in some cases, at the national level. They can be arrested and put to trial provided the will exists for this to be done. We wonder why this will is absent, given the after-effects of sectarianism that we see more and more often in our wounded country.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 4^th, 2013.