Pakistan’s minority Shiite Muslims have started using the word “genocide” to describe a violent spike in attacks against them by a militant Sunni group with suspected links to the country’s security agencies and a mainstream political party that governs the largest province.
lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group of radical Sunni Muslims, who revile Shiites as heretics, has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks throughout Pakistan. linked to al-Qaida, it has been declared a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S., yet it operates with relative ease in Pakistan’s populous Punjab province, where lashkar-e-Jhangvi and several other violent jihadi groups are based.
The violence against Shiites has ignited a national debate - and political arguments - about a burgeoning militancy in Pakistan. The latest attack was a massive bombing earlier this month that ripped apart a Shiite neighborhood in Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi, killing 48 people, many of them as they left a mosque after saying their evening prayers. So far this year nearly 300 Shiites have been killed in devastating bombings, target killings and executions.
The unrelenting attacks also have focused the nation’s attention on freedoms that Pakistani politicians give extremists groups, staggering corruption within the police and prison systems and the murky and protracted relationship between militant groups and Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies.