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

The Conflict Within
and Sunnis started deploying suicide bombers to inflict maximum
casualties. Mosques, religious processions and rallies became the
prime targets of suicide attacks in the sectarian war. Unlike suicide
bombers elsewhere who simply detonated their explosive-strapped
bodies, Pakistani militants hurled grenades and fired on the crowd
before blowing themselves up in order to cause maximum damage. 28
Poverty, unemployment, romantic notions of jihad and the
growing influence of radical Islamic groups were the main reasons
for a young man to turn into a suicide bomber. Between March 2002
and May 2004 there had been 20 cases of suicide bombing, which
had killed more than 200 people. The targets varied from western
nationals to Christian and Shia worshipping places. The majority of
the attackers were unemployed and came from poor families. The
22-year-old Kamran Mir, who blew himself up inside a Christian
church in Taxila in August 2002, killing several worshippers, was an
unemployed school drop-out. He was trained by LeJ. The other two
suicide bombers involved in the attack on a Shia religious procession
in Quetta on 2 March 2004 were jobless former madrasa students.
Abdul Nabi and Hidayatullah were made to believe that Shias were
infidels and that they should be eliminated.
Despite their proscription, most of the militant groups continued
their activities. Some of them resurfaced under new banners. Their
leaders were temporarily detained, but none of them were tried in
a court of law, even those against whom cases were pending. The
example of Azam Tariq exposed the government’s lack of sincerity in
curbing religious extremism. While many politicians were prevented
from fighting elections on patently frivolous grounds, the SSP leader,
accused of sectarian killings, was allowed to contest from jail. He was
freed after he agreed to join the pro-Musharraf alliance in the National
Assembly. To retain Tariq’s support the government ignored the nonbailable
warrants of arrest issued against him by anti-terrorism courts.
He was assassinated in 2003, apparently in a revenge attack by rival
Shia militants. 29
The 42-year-old SSP leader was notorious for his virulent anti-Shia
rhetoric. He was charged in several murder cases which had also
earned him a two year jail sentence in the mid 1990s. Born to a poor
farming family in the small town of Chichawatni in Punjab province,
he graduated from a local madrasa before joining SSP. A firebrand
cleric, Tariq went from being an ordinary activist to the head of the
SSP in less than ten years. As the group’s murder index shot up, so