Pakistan's Descent into Chaos: Terrorist & Drone Attacks

[IBRIS]

Two policemen gunned down in Quetta

QUETTA: Two policemen, including a senior officer, were gunned down and another was injured here on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Assailants targeted one policeman in the main city areas and the other in Hazar Ganji vegetable market located on the outskirts of the provincial capital.

Police officials said on Wednesday the assailants attacked the policemen who were guarding the fruit and vegetable sellers of Shia Hazara community.

Vegetable sellers of Hazara community visit Hazar Ganji vegetable market daily in an escort of three police mobiles and an Armoured Personnel Carrier. The three mobiles and the APC stand guard at the three gates of the market.

...........................These are those two police officers

 

[Mikesingh]

Hafiz Saeed challenges ordinance banning JuD

ISLAMABAD: Hearing a petition filed by Jamaatud Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed challenging the presidential ordinance under which his group has been banned for being on the watchlist of the United Nations, Justice Aamer Farooq of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Friday issued notices to the principal secretary to the president and the secretaries of law, Cabinet Division and Establishment Division.

President Mamnoon Hussain last month promulgated an ordinance amending the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 with regards to proscription of terrorist individuals and organisations to include entities listed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) — in a move to declare Hafiz Saeed-linked JuD and Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF) as proscribed groups.

Hafiz Saeed contended in the petition that he established JuD in 2002 and cut off all ties with the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) but India continued to malign JuD for its past association with the banned outfit.

The JuD chief termed it against the sovereignty of Pakistan that an ordinance was issued to ban his organisation. The petition contends that Pakistan is a sovereign state, but through this ordinance, its sovereignty has been jeopardised.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1394344/hafiz-saeed-challenges-ordinance-banning-jud

These Pakis will never learn. They are already on the Watch List, to be put on the Grey List in June 2018. With Saeed’s shenanigans and if the court lifts the ban on the JuD, then Pak can be assured of the ignominy of being included in the Black List with North Korea and Iran.

 

[Guest]

Seven dead, over a dozen injured in explosion in Raiwind

LAHORE: At least seven people have been killed and over a dozen others injured in a blast on the outskirts of Lahore on Wednesday night.


According to the DIG (Operations), Dr Haider Ashraf, the explosion occurred near a police camp in Raiwind. “The police appear to be the target,” he says.


Fourteen policemen, among them ASP and SHO Raiwind, are among the injured.


The police camp has been set up for the security of the annual congregation of Tableeghi Jamaat.


The nature of the blast is not immediately clear. Police say they are investigating. However, rescuers say it was a cylinder blast.


The injured have been shifted to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital (THQ) Raiwind where some of them are listed in a critical condition, triggering fears that the death toll might go up.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1659987/1/
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1659987/1/

 

[Kalki_2018]

Must be vacuum bulb blast. Can't wait to hear about RAAA saazish against PSL.

 

[Screambowl]

Must be vacuum bulb blast. Can't wait to hear about RAAA saazish against PSL.

jab karti hai raa to tum logo ko problem jab nai karti to modi ko gali ..

arre koi ek narrative toh bana lo LOL

 

[AMCA]

FC soldier killed, another injured in Mohmand gun attack

https://www.dawn.com/news/1396034

 

[AMCA]

My god, what is going on in pakistan these days............

Reminds me of this pic clicked in 1971:

 

[darshan978]

My god, what is going on in pakistan these days............

Reminds me of this pic clicked in 1971:

election??.....................

 

[The Juggernaut]

election??...........

Pastun uprising before 2018 election akin to Bangali resurgence before 1971 election.

 

[mayfair]

Pastun uprising before 2018 election akin to Bangali resurgence before 1971 election.

That election was in 1970. Bengali uprising began way back in 1950s with the language riots. In fact the Awami League campaigned on the platform of autonomy and six-points in the 1970 election.

Now if you were to extrapolate it to today's circumstances,
Bengali uprising -> 1970 Elections -> 1971 Bangladesh

Pashtoon/Baloch uprising -> 2018 elections -> ??

 

[The Juggernaut]

Pashtoon/Baloch uprising -> 2018 elections -> ??

Yeh bhagya na sab din sota hai,
Dekhen aage kya hota hai.

 

[Butter Chicken]

3 policemen neutralised in FATA

At least three policemen were martyred in Dera Ismail Khan on Friday as a roadside bomb exploded when a police convoy was passing through the area, DawnNewsTv reported.

The incident took place in Kolachi tehsil of DI Khan where the convoy of District Police Official (DPO) Zahidullah reportedly came under attack when a remotely-controlled IED exploded near the convoy on Hathala Road, police said.

As a result of the explosion, three policemen travelling in a squad vehicle accompanying the DPO lost their lives whereas four others sustained injuries. Fortunately, DPO Zahidullah survived the incident unscathed.

The injured policemen have been shifted to DHQ hospital Dera Ismail Khan.

A heavy contingent of law enforcement officials surrounded the area following the blast and started search operations, police said.

 

[AMCA]

Pakistani journalists and activists demonstrate against an attack on Ahmed Noorani in Karachi, Pakistan on October 28, 2017. Noorani, a senior journalist from a local newspaper, was beaten by unknown attackers on motorbikes on October 26.
Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images
Pakistan’s military is waging a quiet war on journalists
As activists and journalists are kidnapped, entire regions of the country are going silent.
By Kiran Nazish Updated Mar 27, 2018, 10:30am EDT SHARE
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — On December 2, 2017, 40-year-old Raza Khan, a Pakistani political activist, disappeared from his home. When Raza wouldn’t answer his phone, Khan’s brother went to his residence in Lahore. He found the lights on, the curtains drawn, and the doors locked — but no sign of Raza.

It wasn’t until one of Raza’s activist colleagues visited the house that they found a clue to why he’d disappeared: Raza’s computer was missing. Diep Saeeda, Reza’s colleague, immediately thought that one of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agencies had taken him. “It could be no one else,” she told me.


Saeeda visited police stations, hospitals, restaurants, and the morgue, looking for any trace of Raza. But she turned up nothing, and the authorities had no information either.

Almost three months later, Raza is still missing, and it’s become clear that his disappearance is part of a larger trend.

Pakistan is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for activists and reporters:According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, nearly 10,000 people have gone missing in the country since 2001, with nearly 3,000 still unaccounted for. In 2016 alone, there were 728 disappearances.The HRCP and human rights activists saythese numbers are significantly underreported.

Pakistani activists and university students shout slogans and wave placards as they protest against the killing of Mashal Khan, a journalism student, in Islamabad on April 15, 2017.
Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Images
Pakistan’s powerful and secretive security establishment — which ranges from its feared intelligence agency, the ISI, to the country’s military, which has carried out three coups since its inception in 1947 —has long used abductions to silence anyone who dares to question and expose their actions. This matters, of course, for ordinary Pakistanis, who can’t speak freely about their government. It also affects Pakistani lawmakers, whose ability to craft legislation is hampered by the lack of information.


But the disappearances have real consequences for the rest of the world as well.

In his first tweet of 2018, President Trump took aim at Pakistan’s government and what he called their failure to assist the US in the global war on terror. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit,” he wrote. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help.”

While many may disagree with the US president’s view, his tweet speaks to a larger issue: Pakistan, which is a nuclear power, is battling its own war on terror. Many parts of the country, including Waziristan, on its porous border with Afghanistan, have turned into safe havens for militants and terror groups. The Pakistani military has been accused of working closely with and even aiding terrorists there.

Pakistani soldiers patrol next to a newly erected fence along the Afghan border in North Waziristan on October 18, 2017.
Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images
So as Pakistan becomes a black hole of information due to the lack of reporting and independent voices on the ground, we lose sight of what’s actually taking place. This not only complicates global efforts to counter terrorism but puts the region and the world at large at risk.


In January, the Trump administration announced it would suspend $900 millionin security aid to Pakistan until the country got serious about cracking down on terrorist groups like the Taliban and Haqqani network. But without objective observers and reporting in the region, there’s no way to verify if this is happening.

Pakistan’s intelligence agencies operate like an independent arm of the state
Back in 2015, I experienced the power of the country’s deep state firsthand.

In April, Sabeen Mahmud, a friend of mine and one of the country’s most prominent free speech activists, hosted a panel about disappearances in the country’s largest province, Balochistan. The Pakistani government is fighting a separatist uprising there of Baloch nationalists, and though accurate numbers are difficult to find, more than 20,000 people have reportedly gone missing. The same evening, after the panel concluded, Mahmud was shot and killed by unknown gunmen.

I wrote about her death for an Indian magazineand started receiving threats myself from agents with ISI, Pakistan’s infamous government intelligence agency. They repeatedly told me, both in person and over the phone, that I was going to be killed like my friend Sabeen, “and no one will find who did it.”

I also learned that killing one person and then using their death to generate more fear was a common tactic that the Pakistani intelligence agencies used against journalists. It leads to self-censorship, and it works almost every time.

In Islamabad, Journalist Kiran Nazish interviews tribal leaders from Waziristan, Pakistan, on February 2, 2018.
Umar Wazir/RFI, courtesy of Kiran Nazish
I was no exception. Since the ISI threatened my life, I’ve been too afraid to live and report in Pakistan, and currently divide my time between New York and Turkey.

It’s important to note that Pakistan’s government, although democratically elected, does not have the power to control or influence the far-reaching and powerful military establishment. Intelligence agencies gained more power after 9/11; the ISI in particular received funding and resources from the US and Pakistani governments to help fight the war on terror. The new resources helped the ISI expand its influence and freedom to act however it saw fit, and it began operating much like an independent arm of the government.

The intelligence agencies hold so much power that even the police can’t touch them. An officer at Peshawar’s police headquarters told me the police see several abduction cases a week but can’t write up official police reports. “We have orders not to meddle in such cases that might be part of an anti-terror campaign,” he told me. “The military … is an institution with higher power.”

And despite criticism and warnings from international groups, and pledges by the government of Pakistan, these disappearances seem to be getting worse.

Last year, Pakistan’s Commission on Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances “received nearly 300 cases of alleged enforced disappearances from August to October 2017, by far the largest number in a three month period in recent years,” according to the commission.

And in early 2017, three Pakistani bloggers who were critical of the government disappeared for weeks, without a trace. When they were released, all three described torture and sexual abuse at the hands of Pakistani security personnel.

Protesters hold images of three bloggers who disappeared during a rally in Lahore on January 12, 2017.
Rana Sajid Hussain/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Waqass Goraya, one of the bloggers, said he was detained by a government organization with ties to the Pakistani military. “More and more people are being harmed — our friends, our colleagues — so how can we stop [speaking out]? Someone has to stand up,” he told the BBC. Goraya currently lives in the Netherlands, where he continues his activism from afar.

Reporting on the Pakistani military’s abuses is important. It’s also really dangerous.
Trump alluded in his January tweet to the Pakistani military’s reputation for working closely with terrorist groups. This extends back several decades: In the 1980s, the US covertly sent about $5 billion to Pakistan to fund militant groups to help fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan continued to train and fund militants to help in the fight over Kashmir, a disputed border area between India and Pakistan.

The US ramped up funding to Pakistan again in the wake of 9/11 in exchange for Pakistan’s help in fighting the war on terror. US officials say, however, that they have not seen results and that much of the money has been lost due to corruption, or ended up in the hands of terrorist groups.

In 2011, Saleem Shahzad, a freelance journalist, reported about how Pakistani naval officers were involved in aiding a terrorist attackon Pakistani naval headquarters in Mehran, a short distance from the capital of Karachi. Afterward, Shahzad was brutally murdered. His death received much publicity, and since then, it appears that no Pakistani journalists have dared to report in depth about the military’s links with terrorist groups.

Pakistani journalists offer funeral prayers for their slain colleague Syed Saleem Shahzad outside the National Press Club in Islamabad on Wednesday, June 1, 2011.
B.K. Bangash/AP
“Anyone who reports on Balochistan, or terrorism in Pakistan, knows that the military agencies will come after them,” said Khushal Khan, a research officer at the HRCP.

Waziristan, the restive region on the Western border with Afghanistan, is one of the most underreported places in the country. There’s almost no information that hasn’t been vetted or censored by the military going in or out.

The Pakistani military has claimed several times that they defeated terrorism in this area and forced out the terrorists — but the military refuses to let journalists or NGOs visit the area to verify their claims.

Anyone who attempts to report on what’s happening in Pakistan now runs the risk of disappearing. When I was investigating abductions of civilians from Waziristan in 2015, my sources were threatened and told that they “should not speak to journalists.”

A leading activist in the region, Manzoor Pashteen, told me that hundreds of people who have been critical of the military in the region disappeared in 2017, and dozens more have vanished this year. “Every other day I get a call … [someone] is missing or someone’s body has been found,” Pashteen said.

Last month, when I visited Dera Ismail Khan, a city near Waziristan, I met with more than a dozen civilian sources who said they knew people who had been abducted from the region. The people who were taken had direct knowledge of the alleged close relationship between the Pakistani military and terrorist groups like the Taliban and the Haqqani network, my sources told me.

In November 2017, Pashteen was abducted by intelligence agencies that told him to stop working as an activist and speaking out against the military establishment. But Pashteen said he would continue to be vocal against the continuing abductions.

“What kind of state is this, against its own people?” Pashteen asked me. “This country is also ours, and the state needs to stop treating us like terrorists.”

Kiran Nazish is an independent journalist covering South Asia and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets. She is a former senior fellow at New America.

Pakistani villagers attend the funeral of journalist Haroon Khan in Swabi, Pakistan, on October 13, 2017. The Pakistani Taliban said in a statement that its gunmen killed Khan.
Muhammad Sajjad/AP

 

[Butter Chicken]

Hazara man shot dead, another injured in Quetta attack

In a suspected targeted killing incident, one member of the Shia Hazara community was killed and another was injured when unidentified gunmen opened fire on their vehicle in Quetta's Kandahari Bazaar area on Sunday.

Police sources said a man riding the vehicle died on the spot due to the miscreants' firing, while a second sustained bullet wounds.

Sectarian terrorism in Balochistan has disproportionately targeted people from the Hazara community as they are easily identifiable because of their distinctive physical appearance.

A report released by the National Commission for Human Rights last month stated that 509 members of Hazara community were killed and 627 injured in various incidents of terrorism in Quetta during the last five years.

 

[Butter Chicken]

Despite heavy military presence in Quetta,Pak Army and other federal forces are simply unable to secure the relatively small city of Quetta(Population 10 lakhs)

Police official martyred in Quetta

QUETTA: A Police constable was martyred after some unknown gunmen stormed into a medical store at the Aspeeni Road in Quetta and opened indiscriminate firing on Sunday night.

The victim was shifted to Bolan Medical Complex Hospital Quetta by the rescue team.

Police told media that the deceased was identified as Abdul Ghafar who was police constable. Police also collected evidences from the site of the crime and started investigation.

4 Christians among 7 killed in separate firing incidents in Quetta

At least seven persons were killed in two separate firing incidents in different localities of Quetta city on Monday, DawnNewsTV reported.

In the evening, four members of the Christian community travelling in a rickshaw were killed in a firing incident on Quetta's Shah Zaman road.

Police official Muhammad Anwar Khokhar said unidentified attackers riding a motorbike opened fire on a rickshaw which resulted in the death of four members of the Christian community. A minor girl was also injured in the attack, he added.

In a separate incident earlier in the day, three people were killed and four injured in a firing incident on Quetta's Qmbrani road.

 

[Butter Chicken]

Pakistan- Soldier killed, two injured in Tirah attacks

(MENAFN - Tribal News Network) BARA: One soldier embraced martyrdom and two others sustained injuries in attacks on security check post and vehicle of the security forces in the remote Tirah valley of Khyber Agency on Wednesday.

Sources in the security forces said a soldier, identified as Ayaz Gul, died when terrorists opened fire on a security check post in Gharay area. The terrorists escaped from the scene when the security forces retaliated.

The soldiers going for the help of the under attack security personnel at the check post also came under attack from militants with an improvised explosive device (IED). Two soldiers were injured when their vehicle was hit by the bomb planted on the roadside. The vehicle of the soldiers was completely damaged in the blast. The injured soldiers were taken to hospital.

 

[ezsasa]

Incase anybody is thinking of Quetta as a city, it is a glorified large populated settlement that’s about it. There is definite lack of infrastructure there.

 

[Darth Malgus]

There is word going around that the Pashtun uprising has started effecting PA,after action was taken on several PA officers for having allegiance to the Pashtun Long March..

 

[Yggdrasil]

There is word going around that the Pashtun uprising has started effecting PA,after action was taken on several PA officers for having allegiance to the Pashtun Long March..

If this is true, it's the beginning of the end.

 

[Samsung J7]

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