Islamist groups are stepping up sectarian attacks in Punjab, Pakistan's largest and wealthiest province, to try and further destabilise the U.S. ally already battling al Qaeda and the Taliban, analysts say.
Over the past two months, Sunni Muslims militants affiliated with both Islamist militant groups have increasinged their attacks on adherents of opposing schools of Islam in Punjab.
In May attacks that killed more than 80 people, militants targeted two Lahore mosques of the Ahmadi sect, who consider themselves Muslims but whom Pakistan has declared non-Muslims.
A month later, militants attacked Data Darbar, the Sufi shrine for Pakistan’s most popular Muslim saint, killing 42 people. And in mid-July, a suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite mosque in the city of Sargodha, wounding 15 people.
Analysts say the Punjab strikes share a common strategy: radical Sunni groups are trying to provoke Pakistan’s various sects to hit back in an attempt to inflame civil unrest.
Punjab has traditionally been the powerbase of Pakistan’s ruling establishment. The nuclear-armed South Asian country is considered vital to U.S. efforts to stabilise Afghanistan, so any instability in Punjab – and thus in Pakistan – is a cause for great concern for the United States.
Instability could also impact military operations against militants in the northwest provinces bordering Afghanistan.
"The sectarian militant groups are now becoming more active in Punjab," said security and political analyst Hasan-Askari Rizvi. "These groups now want to create social unrest by fanning sectarian violence in the country."
"It seems to be an attempt by militants to divert attention from operations in the northwest by opening a new front for the government to tackle."
SPLINTER GROUPS
Sectarian violence in not new to Pakistan, particularly in Punjab, which has been a hotbed of hostility between Sunni and Shi’ite militants for decades. In the 1990s, hundreds were killed in Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian violence there.
These incidents decreased after the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, as militant groups focused their attention on fighting Western forces across the border and, later, the Pakistani military in the northwest.
Punjabi militant groups, some of which have been fighting Indian troops in the disputed region of Kashmir, have splintered and forged ties with al Qaeda over the years, officials say.
But among many Pakistanis, these groups command some respect as "freedom fighters" for Kashmir.
This is why critics say the government of Punjab, run by the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, is reluctant to mount a crackdown on hardline groups for fear of losing political support from its conservative powerbase.
However, the attack on Data Darbar sent shockwaves through adherents of Sufism — a mystical tradition within Islam — commonly known as Barelvis in Pakistan. Pakistanis are pre-dominantly Sunni Muslims and most of them are Barelvis.
The austere Taliban are also Sunnis but reject Sufism and tend to belong to the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam.
Shi’ite Muslims account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s 170 million population with Christians, Hindus and other religious groups making up the rest.
INTENSIFY CRACKDOWN
Barelvis have been holding anti-Taliban rallies across the country since the Data Darbar attack and plan to stage a major rally in Lahore on Aug. 8 to press the government to intensify a crackdown on sectarian militants.
"These militants wanted to create chaos and civil war in the country by attacking the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh," Sahibzada Fazal Karim, a leading Barelvi cleric, told Reuters.
"I foresee a bloody revolution if these terrorists are not stopped with force… We fully support offensives against these Taliban terrorists."
Deobandi clerics also denounced the attack, saying they had nothing to do with it, and called for an "indiscriminate" crackdown on all militant groups.
"Barelvis, Deobandis, Shi’ite, Sunnis, all are involved in violence against each other. We all have been slitting each other’s throat," said Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, a former government adviser and a Deobandi cleric. "There is no exception."
The Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah, who is responsible for security in the province, said police had rounded up around 200 men suspected of having links with banned groups. They are hunting for another 200 believed to have gone into hiding.
However, the security official said that none of the suspects detained had yet been linked to any of the attacks and would eventually be released.
