Azaranica is a non-biased news aggregator on Hazaras. The main aim is to promote understanding and respect for cultural identities by highlighting the realities they face on daily basis...Hazaras have been the victim of active persecution and discrimination and one of the reasons among many has been the lack of information, awareness, and disinformation.

Monday, September 17, 2012

رئیس امور زنان دایکندی از چنگ شورشیان آزاد شد


به روز شده: 12:26 گرينويچ - دوشنبه 17 سپتامبر 2012 - 27 شهریور 139



خانم رضایی به خانواده خود در کابل پیوسته است

حوا رضایی، رئیس امور زنان ولایت دایکندی از چنگ شورشیان در ولایت میدان وردک، در غرب کابل آزاد شد.

خانم رضایی دیروز (۲۶ سنبله/شهریور) هنگام سفر از دایکندی در مرکز افغانستان به کابل در دره میدان از سوی افراد مسلح ناشناس گروگان گرفته شد.

گزارشهای اولیه حاکی از آن بود که گروگان گیران خواستار پرداخت پول در مقابل آزادی او شده اند، اما دفتر حلیم فدایی، والی میدان میدان وردک در اعلامیه ای گفته که خانم رضایی بدون هر گونه "معامله" آزاد شده است.

در این اعلامیه آمده که خانم رضایی بر اساس تلاشهای نیروهای امنیتی و بزرگان قومی آزاد شده و به خانواده خود پیوسته است.

سلمان ارزگانی، والی دایکندی به بی بی سی گفت که پس از آزادی خانم رضایی، با او تلفنی صحبت کرده و در سلامتی کامل به سر می برد.

پیش از این روز ۱۸ سنبله/شهریور شاه ولی خان، فرمانده اداره جلب و جذب پلیس دایکندی از سوی شورشیان در دره غوربند هدف شلیک قرار گرفت و کشته شد.

جاده های ارتباطی که ولایت‌های مرکزی دایکندی و بامیان را از طریق دو دره میدان در غرب و غوربند در شمال کابل، با پایتخت وصل می کند، در ماه‌های اخیر به شدت ناامن شده و شورشیان در بخش‌هایی از این جاده‌ها نفوذ کرده اند.

گزارشها از میدان‌وردک حاکی است که شورشیان در منطقه جلریز ایست بازرسی ایجاد کرده و مسافران را بازرسی می‌کنند و در مواردی آنها را با خود می‌برند.

ظرف ماه‌های اخیر در چند مورد از قتل شماری از مسافران در این منطقه به دست شورشیان گزارش شده است.

شورشیان روز ۱۹ سنبله/شهریور شش مسافر را از موتر حامل آنها پیاده کردند و چند ساعت بعد پنج تن از آنها را در کنار جاده اصلی کابل-بامیان تیرباران کردند.

تا حال چند بار در اعتراض به ناامنی در این جاده در شهرهای کابل و بامیان تظاهرات برگزار شده، اما هنوز اقدام موثری برای 
بهبود امنیت در این راه صورت نگرفته است.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Team ‘believes’ something seriously wrong

By: Bari Baloch | September 17, 2012 |

QUETTA - The UN team visiting Quetta discussed the issue of missing persons with delegations of various nationalist parties and groups here on the second consecutive day, on Sunday.Separate delegations of Balochistan National Party-Mengal, Jamhoori Watan Party, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, Hazara Qumi Jirga and Shia Conference called on the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, here at a local hotel.BNP-Mengal acting President Dr Jahanzaib Jamaldini along with secretary information Agha Hassan Baloch, Kurshid Jamaldini and others met the UN mission being headed by Olivier de Frouville.The UN delegation avoided talking to the media, but Agha Hassan Baloch said the UN team told them that they had met with a large number of people and they have the impression that something was seriously wrong because of which the people are so worried and anxious.Talking to The Nation, Agha Hassan Baloch said that they presented a list of 62 leaders of BNP, including party’s former central secretary-general Habib Jalib Baloch, who were targeted killed. He said they told the UN officials that they were killed under a conspiracy.“The number of missing persons in Balochistan is above 14,000, however, the party had prepared a list of 1,000 missing persons and had already dispatched it to UN and other international organisations of human rights. It included 480 decomposed dead bodies found dumped from desolated areas of Balochistan – a fact which the government has also verbally accepted.”The BNP leader said that sheer violation of human rights was underway in Balochistan which had been started in dictatorial regime of Pervez Musharraf and it was continuing without any respite. “The BNP urged UN and other international human rights organisations for playing their due role in ending this violation of human rights, and that through a well-knitted plan political leaders and activists are being eliminated so that nobody could raise voice against the looting and plundering of the resources of the province,” he added.After meeting the UN team, Jahmoori Watan Party’s chief Talal Akbar Bugti told the media that he had apprised the UN officials about the extra judicial arrests, enforced disappearances, violation of human rights and recovery of mutilated dead bodies in Balochistan. “More than 13,000 people are missing in Balochistan. As we have no access to other areas therefore the JWP delegation presented a list of only 650 missing persons with complete details,” Talal Bugti said. However, he said that they had no “big expectations” from the UN because wherever it has interest it deploys its army and where it has no interest it keeps mum and does not show any serious concern.Sources said that a delegation of Hazara Qumi Jirga apprised the UN Working Group about the sectarian targeted killing of Hazara community and that the government was not playing its role in curbing such incidents. They urged upon the UN to exert pressure on government to ensure security to the Hazara community.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Man killed in Quetta

September 14, 2012 - Updated 2124 PKT
From Web Edition



QUETTA: A man was killed in the Kashmirabad area of Quetta here on Thursday, police said.

Police sources said that armed men opened fire at a man on the Qambrani Road, in the precincts of Sariab police station, killing him on the spot.

The assailants managed to escape from scene.The dead body of deceased after the autopsy was handed over to heirs. Police registered a case and started search for the suspects.

A 13-year-old Hazara boy is killed, only to become a statistic




Last Saturday was just another day in 13-year-old Liaquat Ali's house in Quetta. The young Hazara boy's mother asked him to help her with some chores, but he wanted to go out. After some back and forth of her pleading and him refusing, he walked out. His father went back twice to persuade him to come back and help his mother with the chores.

"I have to go; you won't see me again," he said angrily to his mother. He was wrong. And he was right.

They did see him a short while later. By then, his body had bullet wounds, his bleeding wouldn't stop, and he was in a coma.

His father, Mohammad Akbar, is wracked with guilt. "They said he's unconscious. He never spoke again." Liaquat's words had come true in the most terrible way possible.

The ongoing massacre of Hazaras by extremists in Balochistan is part of the killing of Shias all across the country, which has left hundreds dead and thousands mourning. Millions more have been outraged by the lack of action by the government.

There was a protest demonstration on Brewery Road in Quetta that day against the violence against the Hazaracommunity, only a few minutes away from MohalaBagh where Liaquat Ali lived.

He left the house at 10:30 in the morning. A few minutes later, his father learned that a Hazaraneighbour from his street had become a victim of the violence. He went to their house to console the grieving family and waited for yet another body to arrive. At 11, it was him who needed consoling....Continue Reading....

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Quetta CNBC TV program About Shia Target Killing 2nd episode Complete

Pakistan Shiites face rising militant attacks

Published: September 11, 2012

Story Photos:







By KATHY GANNON — Associated Press


QUETTA, PAKISTAN — In the Shiite Muslim graveyard of this provincial Pakistani capital, entire sections are dedicated to the hundreds killed by Sunni militants over the past two years, their portraits line the cobblestone entrance, some garlanded with wilted flowers.

There's Abid Ali Nazish, a popular movie star executed by gunmen in the summer. Nearby are the portraits of two brothers who were dragged out of a bus and shot to death on the road as they returned from pilgrimage in June. An Olympic boxer, Ibrar Hussain, has a large portrait, and then a smaller photo on his grave showing him sitting proudly next to American boxing great Mohammed Ali.

Hussain was just leaving Quetta's Ayub Stadium when a motorcyclist drove by and gunned him down last year, said Bostan Kishtmandi, a local Shiite politician, as he strolled past the graves. He "was retired and teaching our young boxers. We loved him," Kishtmandi said.

Pakistan's Shiite minority is feeling under siege as Sunni militants who view them as heretics step up a campaign of sectarian attacks, targeting them with shootings and car bombings. More than 300 Shiites have been killed so far this year, according to Human Rights Watch. The province of Baluchistan, where Quetta is the capital and which has the country's largest Shiite community, has borne the brunt, with more than 100 killed this year, on the way to surpassing the 2011 total of 118.

"I am afraid of terrorists everywhere in Quetta, except here with the dead," said Gulbar Abbas, an elderly man who spends every day in the graveyard, living off donations from visitors as he sits on a dirty quilt on a stone slab and reads the Quran from morning to night.

The sectarian bloodletting adds another layer to the turmoil in Pakistan, where the government is fighting an insurgency by the Pakistani Taliban and where many fear Sunni hardliners are gaining strength. Shiites and rights group say the government does little to protect Shiites and that militants are emboldened because they are believed to have links to Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

The powerful agencies have often been linked to the murky world of militancy, accused of using hardline Sunni Muslim militants against enemy India in the disputed Kashmir region and against U.S. and NATO soldiers next door in Afghanistan.

But the rise in the bloodshed and worries over security slipping out of control are bringing pressure for action. Fearing an all-out sectarian war, the Baluchistan government last week called in the paramilitary Frontier Corps to help the understaffed and underequipped local police.

The judiciary has also become unprecedentedly vocal in pointing the finger at the intelligence agencies. Last week, a panel of three Supreme Court judges, led by Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, told a packed Quetta courtroom that it had heard testimony that militants were getting weapons and unregistered vehicles from the intelligence agencies. At least two suicide attacks this year in Quetta involved unregistered vehicles, according to the police. The court ordered the government to produce a list of all weapons and ammunition permits issued on the orders of the intelligence agencies, as well as vehicles brought into Pakistan duty free by the agencies.

In a strong and rare rebuke, the judges slammed the security agencies' record against militant activities in Quetta.

"The result is zero. There has been zero accomplished, not against suicide bombings, not against target killings," Chaudhry said.

So far, the intelligence and security agencies have not responded.

Shiites make up around 15 percent of Pakistan's 190 million people. They are scattered around the country, but the southwestern province of Baluchistan has the largest community, mainly made up of ethnic Hazaras, easily identified by their facial features which resemble Central Asian features. They number some 300,000 in Quetta, a city of 1.2 million people.

Sunni extremists consider all Shiites as heretics, and militants have long carried out attacks against the community. But the sectarian campaign has stepped up in recent years, fueled mainly by the radical group Laskar-e-Jangvhi, aligned to Pakistani Taliban militants headquartered in the tribal regions. The violence has pushed Baluchistan in particular deeper into chaos. The province was already facing an armed insurgency by ethnic Baluch separatists who frequently attack security forces and government facilities. But the secessionist violence has been overtaken by increasingly bold attacks against Shiites.

Militants have packed cars with explosives and driven them into buses carrying Shiite Muslim students to universities and pilgrims returning from holy sites in Iran. Gunmen have walked into shops in Quetta's busy bazaars and slaughtered storekeepers as they tended to customers. They have picked off prominent Shiites as they left their homes for work. They have taken out newspaper ads telling Shiites to leave Quetta and Pakistan and vowing to kill any Sunni who calls a Shiite a friend.

More than 300 Shiites have been killed in Baluchistan alone the past two years, the community here says. Thirty-eight Shiites were killed in just two weeks in Quetta earlier this year, said a liberal political party representing Hazaras. When were these two weeks?

As a result, many Shiites in Quetta have pulled their children from universities, shuttered their shops and rarely step out of the two enclaves in the city where their numbers dominate. There have been a few revenge attacks killing Sunni Muslim clerics.

Lashkar-e-Janghvi, headquartered in Pakistan's Punjab province, has carried out attacks elsewhere in the country as well. On Monday, a car bomb killed 12 Shiites in the Kurram tribal region, the only tribal area where Shiites outnumber Sunnis.

"The situation is worsening day by day," Baluchistan's chief minister, Mohammed Aslam Raisani, told The Associated Press in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. "Of course I am concerned."

Last month police in the eastern Punjab province arrested a leader of Lashkar-e-Janghvi, Malik Ishaq, for inciting hate. But on Monday, he was freed on bail.

That only fueled Shiites' believe that the government has little interest in going after those who attack their community.

"From law enforcement, government or any institution we are 100 percent disappointed," Abdul Khaliq Hazara, leader of the Hazara Democratic Party, said at his home in Quetta.

"We also blame elements with the intelligence agencies that support them (Sunni militants) and give them shelter, show them the routes. It has become a policy it seems for them to bring religious extremism to this area," he said.

The Baluchistan government's move to call in the paramilitary Frontier Corps reflects their struggle with dealing with the violence.

"We decided to call them in for two months because we didn't want to take a chance on human lives," Baluchistan's top bureaucrat and Chief Secretary Babar Yaqoob Fateh Muhammed told The AP. "Right now sectarianism is our biggest threat. We have made some progress. But have we succeeded? No."

"We know it is Lashkar-e-Janghvi and we have to attack them. ... There is no reluctance to conducting a big operation or to going after them in a big way but so far we have not had very useful information," he said.

The Frontier Corps and the police have provided security to Shiite Muslims travelling in Quetta, escorting school buses and local merchants. Few arrests have been made and Hazara said his political party wants the Frontier Corps and the police "to go after everyone involved in the killings."

Kathy Gannon is AP Special Regional Correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan. She can be followed on http://www.twitter.com/kathygannon