Munir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn Afghan woman and child in Kabul on Oct. 23.
KABUL — Two separate killings this past weekend sent a new kind of chill down the spines of observers in Kabul. The first was a suicide blast in a mosque in Faryab Province, in the northwest, during the Muslim festival of Id al-Adha, which killed at least 45 people, many of them civilians. In the second attack — which got much less attention — five Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic minority, were reportedly pulled off a van and killed in Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan.
Although this country already sees a daily toll of civilian deaths from gunfights, I.E.D.’s and airstrikes, these killings were particularly worrisome because they suggest two types of nihilistic violence common in Iraq and Pakistan but that Afghanistan has yet to see: attacks designed to cause mass casualties among civilians and sectarian murders.
The conflict in Iraq has had a strong Sunni vs. Shiite dynamic, with Sunni militant groups bombing Shiite mosques and shopping areas, and Shiite death squads — often with links to the government — kidnapping and executing Sunnis. In Pakistan, the violence is more lopsided, with extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi carrying out a campaign of assassinations against Shiites, mostly Hazaras, in the city of Quetta. It is also common for militants in Pakistan to target mosques and bazaars in reprisal for successful government operations against them....Continue Reading...
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