Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Frontline Pakistan
Sunni militants gunned down Sadiq Ganji, Iran’s consul general in
Lahore, in retribution. The incident drew international attention to
the conflict, which reached a peak in 1994, one of the worst and the
bloodiest years, with at least 74 people killed in sectarian attacks.
Most of the deaths occurred in attacks on Shia religious gatherings.
Many policemen were also killed in targeted attacks. Iranian interests
were particularly targeted by the Sunni extremists. In January 1997,
an Iranian cultural centre was set on fire in Lahore. A few days later
a similar attack in the southern Punjab town of Multan killed seven
people including an Iranian diplomat. In another attack five Iranian air
force personnel were killed in Rawalpindi. 18 Shia militants retaliated
with a bomb attack at Lahore High Court, which killed the new SSP
chief, Ziaur Rehman.
The sectarian conflict took a more violent turn with the formation
in 1996 of LeJ. A breakway faction of SSP, the new sectarian outfit led
by Riaz Basra, believed in using terror tactics to force the government
to accept its demand of declaring the Shia community a non-Muslim
minority and establishing an orthodox Sunni Islamic system in the
country. Born to a poor farmer in the central Punjab district of Sargodha,
Basra received his primary education at a madrasa in Lahore before
joining the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. An injury forced him to
return home and he joined SSP in 1986. A fiery orator, Basra quickly
rose up in the hierarchy. In 1988, he became the chief of the party’s
propaganda department; the same year he stood in elections for a
Punjab state assembly seat from Lahore.
Basra’s notoriety as the most dangerous terrorist grew further after
he was arrested for the murder of Sadiq Ganji in 1994. He made a
daring escape from an anti-terrorism court in Lahore and later fled to
Afghanistan, but he would often return to Pakistan to organize terrorist
attacks. LeJ made its mark as the most feared terrorist outfit soon after
its inception. Although the number of its hard-core cadres had never
been more than five hundred, the group was responsible for most
of the sectarian killings over the last decade. By 2001, LeJ had been
involved in 350 incidents of terrorism.
Most of the LeJ militants came from among the rural unemployed
and Deobandi madrasas, particularly those in southern Punjab, but its
highly secretive and mobile organization made it more lethal. Unlike
other Islamic militant groups, LeJ avoided media exposure and tried to
operate as covertly as possible. Its only contact with the outside world
was through occasional fax messages to newspaper offices claiming