“About 20 men dressed as Pakistani soldiers boarded a bus bound for a Muslim festival outside this mountain town and checked the identification cards of the passengers. They singled out 19 Shi’ites, drew weapons and slaughtered them, most with a bullet to the head.
The shooters weren’t soldiers. They were a hit squad linked to the Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or LeJ. They had trekked in along a high Himalayan pass that hot August morning to waylay a convoy of pilgrims.
Here and across Pakistan, violent Sunni radicals are on the march against the nation’s Shi’ite minority.
With a few hundred hard-core cadres, the highly secretive LeJ aims to trigger sectarian violence that would pave the way for a Sunni theocracy in U.S.-allied Pakistan, say Pakistan police and intelligence officials. Its immediate goal, they say, is to stoke the intense Sunni-Shi’ite violence that has pushed countries like Iraq close to civil war.
More than 300 Shi’ites have been killed in Pakistan so far this year in sectarian conflict, according to human rights groups. The campaign is gathering pace in rural as well as urban areas such as Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city.
The Shi’ites are a big target, accounting for up to 20 percent of this nation of 180 million.
In January, LeJ claimed responsibility for a homemade bomb that exploded in a crowd of Shi’ites in Punjab province, killing 18 and wounding 30. LeJ’s reach extends beyond Pakistan:
Late last year, LeJ claimed responsibility for bombings inAfghanistan that killed 59 people, the worst sectarian attacks since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.
“No doubt – (LeJ) are the most dangerous group,” said Chaudhry Aslam, a top counter-terrorism police commando based in Karachi, whose house was blown up by the LeJ. “We will fight them until the last drop of blood.”
For an outlawed group accused of fomenting such mayhem, the leader of LeJ is surprisingly easy to find.
Malik Ishaq spent 14 years in jail in connection with dozens of murder and terrorism cases.
He was released after the charges could not be proved – partly because of witness intimidation, officials say – and showered with rose petals by hundreds of supporters when he left prison in July 2011.
Although Ishaq is one of Pakistan’s most feared militants, he enjoys the protection of followers clutching AK-47 assault rifles in the narrow lane outside his home.
There, in the town of Rahim Yar Khan in southern Punjab province, Reuters visited him for an interview.
“The state should declare Shi’ites as non-Muslims on the basis of their beliefs,” said Ishaq, calling them the “greatest infidels on earth.” Young supporters with shoulder-length hair in imitation of the Prophet Mohammad hung on every word.
FOLLOWING THE TRAIL
To assess the LeJ threat, Reuters followed the group’s trail across Pakistan – from Ishaq’s compound, to Gilgit in the foothills of the Himalayas, recruiting grounds in central Punjab, and the backstreets of Karachi on the Arabian Sea coast.
In interviews, police, intelligence officials, clerics and LeJ members described a group that has grown more robust and appears to be operating across a much wider area in Pakistan than just a few years ago. But it had a head start.
The LeJ once enjoyed the open support of the powerful spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.
The ISI used such groups as military proxies in India and Afghanistan and to counter Shi’ite militant groups.
Since being outlawed after the attacks of September 11, 2001,
LeJ has worked with Sunni radical groups al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in several high-profile strikes.
Among them were assaults in 2009 on Pakistan’s military headquarters and on Sri Lanka’s visiting cricket team.
Washington says LeJ was involved in the killing of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in 2002.
Now it is gathering strength anew.
The risks are heightened by Pakistan’s long-standing role as a battlefield in a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran, which have been competing for influence in Asia and the Middle East since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
That competition has heated up since the United States toppled secularist dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq and left the country under the control of an Iranian-influenced Shi’ite government.
Intelligence officials say the LeJ is drawing financial support from Saudi donors and other Sunni sources.
“Unfortunately, the state for strategic reasons turned a blind eye to the LeJ for a long time,” said a retired army general. “Now we have a situation where it has become Pakistan’s Frankenstein.”
Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who is in charge of internal security, told Reuters that “we always take action” against the LeJ when the group is suspected of murder or terrorism. “We track people and arrest them.”
When asked why those arrested are often freed, he said: “Look, my job is to arrest people, not to let them go.
We all know who lets them off the hook and why,” he said, referring to local politicians and elements of the military who turn a blind eye to their activities or even support them in some cases.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-pakistan-militants-idUSBRE89N00W20121024
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