Two high profile killings over the weekend highlight a growing problem that attracts little media attention in the West: attacks on Pakistan’s Shia minority by Sunni militants.
On Saturday, gunmen in Karachi murdered a prominent Shia cleric’s son and his bodyguard. And on Sunday, in Sargodha in Punjab, suspected militants from the sectarian Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions) shot dead a brigadier in the Pakistani army. That a serving officer was killed in a Shia mosque in a military cantonment suggests a new level of brazenness for anti-Shia groups in Pakistan.
Violence between Sunnis and Shia in Pakistan is a relatively new phenomenon. Unlike in the Arab world, historically Shia Muslims did not form an underclass among Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, himself belonged to a Shia sect. Several of the country’s prominent early leaders were also Shia, including the first president, Iskander Mirza, and Pakistan’s first ambassador to the US, M. A. H. Ispahani. Though reliable figures don’t exist, as many as a fifth of Pakistan’s 180 million people may be Shia.
Only in the 1980s, under the fundamentalist Sunni dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul-Haq, did the compact between Sunni and Shia begin to fray. That’s when Pakistan was sucked into a shadowy proxy war for influence between two rival strains of radical Islam: the messianic Shia variety propagated by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, and Wahhabism, the austere back-to-basics form of Sunni Islam championed by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis also poured cash into madrassas propagating Deobandism, a close cousin of their own harsh version of Islam born in nineteenth century India.
Despite spawning violent sectarian outfits of their own, the Shia have largely been on the receiving end of the violence. In recent years, it has spread from southern Punjab and Karachi to Quetta in Balochistan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Pakistan’s troubled border with Afghanistan. In a 2005 report, the International Crisis Group estimated that Shia accounted for 70% of sectarian deaths over the previous 20 years. Since then, the killing has become even more one-sided. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, over 700 Pakistani Shia were killed last year. At particular risk are Balochistan’s Shia Hazara, whose ethnicity makes them stand out.
The rise of ISIS, and deepening sectarian conflicts in both Iraq and Syria, will only fuel the killings. According to the Pakistani researcher Zia ur Rehman, by late last year the hardline Pakistani Sunni groups Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Tehreek-e-Taliban had already funneled about 100-150 Sunni fighters to Syria. (A rare outbreak of polio in Syria was traced to Pakistan, one of three countries that has yet to eradicate the disease.)
With sectarian conflict in the Middle East showing no signs of abating, and with Pakistan’s authorities—both civilian and military—showing a remarkable tolerance for Sunni sectarian groups, odds are that attacks on Pakistan’s beleaguered Shia community aren’t about to subside any time soon.
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