By Dr
Mohammad Taqi
February 19, 2015
“Nowhere, nowhere at all, does a trace of blood
remain;
Nothing on the assassin’s hands, nails or clothes;
The dagger’s lips, the knifepoint, no redness
disclose,
No spot upon the ground, on the roof no stain
Nowhere, nowhere at all, does a trace of blood remain”
— The Trace of Blood by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translation by Dr Sarvat Rahman.
Peshawar was soaked in blood yet again this past
Friday. The target once again was the beleaguered Shia community. The worshippers
at the Imamia mosque in Peshawar’s Hayatabad suburb were attacked by
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) jihadists using Kalashnikov rifles and suicide
vests. Over 20 Shias perished in as many minutes, most of them from the Kurram
tribal agency and the Hangu region. Among the fallen was Arif Tirmizi whose
brother, the much-loved Dr Asim Hussain Tirmizi, had been mowed down at his
clinic in Hayatabad last month. The volunteers guarding the mosque are said to
have resisted the terrorists but were outgunned. A horrifying video captured on
the mobile phone of a survivor shows one of the most barbaric episodes
perpetrated on the Shias with bursts of automatic fire being discharged and two
suicide bombers blowing themselves up one after another. The clip, however,
also shows one of the most valiant acts of resistance against the TTP when a
congregation member, Abbas Ali, got up and grabbed one of the suicide bombers
by his throat, preventing him from exploding his vest. Abbas, who was then
gunned down by another jihadist, was from the Shakh-Daulat Khel twin villages
in the Kurram Agency.
Traces of Shia blood are splattered all over the
Imamia mosque but not a single federal government representative or a military
official has bothered to visit the site yet. According to media reports,
government and military officials have instead ordered the Turi and Bangash
tribesmen of the Kurram Agency to disarm. The predominantly Shia Pashtuns of
Upper Kurram Agency are perhaps the only tribal entity that has successfully
fought off the Taliban and their allies since at least 2007. They could not
have done it without their arms, especially when the federal government,
assorted political parties and the military left them blockaded for three
years. The Kurramis had to take the arduous
Parachinar-Khost-Gardez-Kabul-Jalalabad route to reach Peshawar when the
Taliban besieged them. The Kurrmay-wal — as they like to call themselves —
survived through qaumi wasla (the tribe’s arms cache), local produce, minuscule
remittances from expatriate relatives, medicines bought in Afghanistan and,
above all, sheer willpower to withstand the Taliban offensive till an accord
was signed in February 2011. The Pakistani security establishment had pushed
then, as it is doing now, for the Turis and Bangash to give up the qaumi wasla
without even lifting a finger to help them with their security.
According to a newspaper report, the FATA secretary
for law and order, Mr Shakeel Qadir, said that the tribes would not be allowed
to keep heavy weapons while a tribal elder stated that “a junior commissioned
officer conveyed a message of the colonel commandant of the Kurram militia to
the people to hand over every type of heavy weapons and ammunition
immediately.” The irony is that while the Kurramis are asked to disarm, in
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province schoolteachers are being trained by the military to
use automatic weapons! Without their weaponry the residents of Upper Kurram
would become sitting ducks. Given the ferocity of the previous onslaught
against the Turis and Bangash, there is no way that they could have defended
themselves without heavy weapons. Not that one considers the militarisation of
the populace desirable but the Shia Pashtuns of Kurram have been left high and
dry by the state for almost a decade now. In fact, elements from the
establishment had pushed upon Parachinar individuals like Eid Nazar Mangal of a
rabidly anti-Shia sectarian outfit Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). Over the last
five years, I have discussed in this column in detail the evolution of the
conflict in Kurram and the Pakistani establishment’s designs to relocate its
jihadist assets, including the Jalaluddin Haqqani network, to the west and
northwest Kurram Agency. Pakistani officialdom’s loud proclamation to the
contrary notwithstanding, nothing seems to have changed since.
That we have yet to see a single Haqqani network
terrorist apprehended by the Pakistani security agencies does not exactly
inspire confidence in their assertions that the distinction between the
so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jihadists has been jettisoned. Former military
dictator General Pervez Musharraf had made what was dubbed then a landmark
decision in January 2002, ostensibly banning assorted jihadist groups including
the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
(LeT). Thirteen years on, however, General Musharraf has stated in an interview
to the Guardian that “the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate
cultivated the Taliban after 2001 because Karzai’s government was dominated by
non-Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group, and officials who were
thought to favour India.” The world has the luxury to wait another 13 years to
find out the veracity of Pakistan’s present claims to have abandoned jihadism
as a tool of its foreign policy but the Pashtun tribes of Kurram face an
existential threat due to both their Shia faith and the geostrategic location
of their abode.
The Pakistani Shias at large are likely to remain a
target as the government’s spreadsheet counterterrorism that churns out fuzzy
numbers about the potential terrorists nabbed while the Madrasa (seminary)
networks, which have apostatised the Shias and prepared the ground for
exterminating them en masse, remain untouched. As the military prepares for its
Pakistan Day parade next month, 41 seminaries in and around Islamabad have been
ordered shut lest terrorists use them as a bridgehead for an attack on the
parade. If the seminaries are such an obvious threat to the military parade,
how could they be good for the population at large? In all likelihood, the TTP
attackers that massacred the Shias at the Hayatabad mosque had taken sanctuary
at some local seminary-mosque complex just like the Army Public School Peshawar
attackers had done. Chances are that like the umpteen attacks on the Shias
before, the government and the military will not bother to bring the enablers
of the Peshawar attack to book either; the massacre at the Imamia mosque too
will end up as Faiz once said:
“This orphan blood for long cried out hopelessly,
None had the time to listen, nor thought of going to
see,
No plaintiff, no witness, the page was quickly turned.
It was the blood of the lowly, to the earth it
returned!”
Dr Mohammad Taqi can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki
Source:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/19-Feb-2015/no-trace-of-shia-blood
URL: http://newageislam.com/islam-and-politics/dr-mohammad-taqi/no-trace-of-shia-blood/d/101591