Brutal wake-up call
All three lie in unmarked graves in a cemetery beside a field of cotton. Abdul Razzaq described his losses calmly, but his slight frame is withered by grief. His one surviving child was seriously injured in the blast. He keeps asking for his brothers and sisters.
My heart is not at peace,” Abdul Razzaq said. “I can’t sit in one place. I just roam around the village, from one place to another.”
The explosion in his remote village was one of a series of brutal wake-up calls about the growing militant threat in south Punjab.
Interviews we have conducted with senior police officers, independent analysts and militants in custody suggest that southern Punjab could be Pakistan’s next battleground.
Internal police documents we have seen paint a picture of a province at risk.
One report states that “poverty stricken, extremely feudalistic and illiterate south Punjab could possibly provide shelter to Taliban and other jihadi outfits. It has the potential to become a nursery or a major centre for sectarian recruitment.”
Some experts here argue that it has already reached that point. One describes it as “a factory for suicide bombers”.
Police say that al-Qaeda has access to a labour pool via the banned sectarian group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), among others.
Comments are closed.
