Mustafa Qadri

Mustafa Qadri finds out for himself during a night patrol with members of an anti-Taliban militia in Pakistan that sometimes, it’s kill or be killed. On the boundary between Pakistan-controlled Peshawar and insurgency-hit regions of the tribal areas, the global fight against the Taliban has turned former neighbours in this once sleepy rural setting into [...]

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[Listen to audio report here] By Mustafa Qadri It has been a relatively quiet winter in Peshawar with few bombings. There’s a sense that life is slowly returning to normal. But take a short drive north of the city and the situation is quite different. The village of Adezai marks the boundary between Peshawar city and [...]

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Blasphemy is the one thing that Pakistani Islamists agree on. The murder of a secular liberal politician has prompted a worrying union of Islamists and the Taliban, reports Mustafa Qadri from Karachi Pakistan’s blasphemy laws make it a crime to defile the Quran or to defame Prophet Mohammad, punishable by life imprisonment and death respectively. [...]

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January 27, 2011By Mustafa Qadri Peshawar is a hotspot for suicide and IED attacks. Mustafa Qadri travels with the city’s bomb squad to find out how local police are coping. Image credit:Mustafa Qadri In almost any other city in the world, last year would have sounded like a nightmare—25 bombings, including one at a marketplace in [...]

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Pakistanis must challenge the routine prejudice that condemns an ancient transgender community to violence and ridicule

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 May 2010 18.30 BST

A great challenge for Pakistan has been crafting a sense of shared identity. But with much of the ensuing identity politics spiralling into sectarian and communal violence in recent decades, it isn’t surprising that minorities here face the worst forms of neglect and persecution.

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Already ravaged by high inflation, massive energy shortages and political turmoil, Pakistan has been shocked by bombings in most of its major cities, writes Mustafa Qadri

Pakistan is enduring the most brutal spate of political violence since the Punjab-dominated Army was implicated in mass slaughter in 1971. Despite military victories in large swathes of the tribal areas that are home to the Taliban, Pakistan’s major cities have been rocked by an escalating series of violent events that, according to one estimate, have claimed 544 lives in a little under three months.

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The Taliban Has No Plan B

By Mustafa Qadri

The Taliban is stepping up its violent attacks but ordinary Pakistanis have had enough and the organisation is losing popular support, reports Mustafa Qadri from near the Swat valley…

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Isolating the Taliban

Violence in Pakistan can only be tackled if the state listens to devastated communities and recognises the Taliban threat

Mustafa Qadri

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 18.30 BST

It was really only a matter of time before we would see this. A day after a bomb ripped through central Lahore, three explosions rocked Peshawar – two at the famous storytellers’ market, and another near the city’s railway station, destroying significant amounts of property, lives and livelihoods. It is too early to know what motivated these latest attacks in Peshawar. Like so much of the North-West Frontier Province, however, Peshawar businesses, particularly book music shops and women’s clothing stores, have been heavily hit, often after being told to shut for being unIslamic.

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Pakistan’s displaced voice fear and anger

13 May 2009 17:10:00 GMT

Written by: Mustafa Qadri

A veteran of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan rues the misfortune of being homeless in his own country.

Mustafa Qadri in Peshawar and Tahir Ali in Rangmala talk to civilians displaced by a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban militants in the Swat valley that has uprooted hundreds of thousands…

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In a dark echo of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, violent religious extremists in Pakistan are moving to restrict girls’ education as they seek to impose a draconian version of Islamic law on a beleaguered population.

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The latest Peshawar blast was a sectarian crime but it has ended up killing indiscriminately Muslims of all sects.

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Dozens of containers, possibly holding supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, burned after militants attacked a Pakistani freight terminal with mortars and grenades early Sunday, according to Pakistani police officials.

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The following piece on Peshawar, Pakistan’s besieged border capital, was published in today’s NewMatilda.com:

Tension in the High Fort

By Mustafa Qadri

Close to Taliban-controlled regions and under pressure from the US, Peshawar’s residents daily negotiate the contradictions of Pakistani life, writes Mustafa Qadri from the North Western Frontier Province…

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