Mustafa Qadri

Suicide attacks have become so common in Pakistan that they often don’t even make the Western press. Mustafa Qadri meets the father of a suicide bomber in the country’s North West Frontier Province

Darra Adam Khel, just south of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, has always been a dangerous transit zone between Afghanistan, Peshawar, and the southern most regions of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Until recently it was also part of the Taliban heartland.

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Pakistan’s divided Taliban

Despite internal divisions and a bloody army crackdown, the Pakistani Taliban are a long way from being defeated

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 June 2009 16.00 BST
o Article history

Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban warlord from Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal agency, often described as Emir Baitullah, is widely seen as the movement’s leader in the country. For at least the past two years, Pakistani authorities have sought to attribute most of the terrorism that occurs in this troubled nation to him. According to the North West Frontier Province governor Owais Ahmed Ghani, Baitullah is “the root cause of all the evil”.

Perhaps that is why he was targeted in what was probably the latest and deadliest US drone attack in Pakistan. While the strike failed to kill Mehsud, it did leave the charred remains of anywhere between 40 and 100 people scattered amid the wreckage of a South Waziristan mosque. This has become a dirty war, and neither insurgents nor counterinsurgents have hesitated to attack places of worship.

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The recent upsurge of jihadi violence in Punjab, the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan’s provincial capital, Quetta, demonstrates the threat extremist Sunni-Deobandi groups pose to the Pakistani citizen and state.

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“The Taliban’s War Against Muslims” NewMatilda.com 1 September 2008
(The Taliban claims to be a Muslim movement but most of its victims are Muslims, writes Mustafa Qadri from Islamabad)

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