Pakistani Sunni militants stoking sectarian rift against Shi’ites: minister
Pro-Taliban Pakistani militants are trying to fuel a sectarian rift, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, as a new wave of violence piled pressure on a government already struggling with a flood crisis.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on two Shi’ite rallies that killed nearly 90 people in the cities of Quetta and Lahore in the past three days. The attacks ended a lull after devastating floods which affected 20 million people. Pakistani officials had said before the attacks that any major violence at such a difficult time was likely to cause deep popular resentment against the militants.
Malik said after taking a beating in their strongholds in the country’s northwest in a string of military offensives, al Qaeda-linked militants were adding a religious color to their activities to whip up sectarianism.
Thousands have been killed in sectarian violence by majority Sunni and minority Shi’ite sects in the past two decades. But Shi’ite violence has largely declined in recent years.
Malik said the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), al Qaeda and the Sunni Muslim Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), one of the most violent anti-Shi’ite groups with roots in the central Punjab province, were all part of the same organization.
“Lashkar-e-Jhanvi, al Qaeda, TTP; they are one,” he said. “And the TTP are there whenever there is suicide bombing.”
from Afghan Journal:
The Taliban, an enigma wrapped in a riddle ?
(Taliban in Kunduz- REUTERS/Wahdat )
Anne Stenersen of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment has published by far one of the most detailed studies of the Taliban, their structure, leadership and just how they view the world. Its interesting because even after all these years they remain a bit of an enigma beginning with the reclusive founder and supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
As Stenersen notes, a lot of the attention within NATO has been on defeating the insurgency or how best to manage it. Less attention has been given to trying to understand who the insurgents are, and what they are fighting for. Even the way we describe them is not very defined. The insurgents are often lumped together as "al Qaeda and the Talban" , even though in many fundamental ways they could be vastly dissimilar, or described as OMF (Other military Forces) as NATO tends to do in militaryspeak, perhaps in the belief that denying them a proper name diminishes them.
On the ground, soldiers often describe the enemy as "anyone shooting at us" making it even more vague. Obviously the nature of the insurgency has something to do with this : the great diversity in Afghanistan's demography and geography means the insurgency can vary from region to region, or even from one village to the other. You could be fighting a Taliban commander in one, and a warlord linked to them in the other.
But the insurgency in Afghanistan is certainly not a collection of small, locally based militas with no overall leadership or structure. And neither do the insurgents themselves see it that way and its important to hear their view of themselves, both in the event of trying to seek reconciliation or to crush them militarily.
Today Mullah Omar's Taliban movement describes itself as a resistance movement with a leadership, organisation structure, a defined goal and strategy and even an official "code of conduct" for its members. And it has made clear repeatedly it likes to be referred to as The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the official name of the regime which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Tahir ul-Qadri and the difficulty of reporting on fatwas
It never was and may never be easy to report about fatwas for a world audience. This point was driven home once again today when a prominent Islamic scholar presented to the media his new 600-page fatwa against terrorism and suicide bombing. Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri is a Pakistani-born Sufi scholar whose youth workshops fostering moderation and understanding in Britain had already caught our attention. His effort to knock down any and every argument in favour of violence is certainly welcome. But the back story to this event is so complicated that it’s hard to report on the fatwa without simply ignoring many important parts of this back story.
Part of the problem was the PR drumroll leading up to ul-Qadri’s news conference. Minhaj-ul-Quran, his international network to spread his Sufi teachings, touted this fatwa in an email to journalists a week ago as a unique event “because at no time in history has such an extensively researched and evidenced work been presented by such a prominent Islamic authority.” Hype like this usually prompts journalists to throw an invitation straight into the trash can.
Two days later, on February 25, the pitch was changed to present this document as “the first ever fatwa against terrorism which declares terrorists as disbelievers.” Now, that’s more likely to grab a busy journalist’s attention. But once it has accomplished that, any hack with any experience covering Islam finds two big problems with this description.
First, it plays on a widely-held (and sometimes willful) misperception that Muslim leaders have not spoken out against Islamist violence. Large numbers of Muslim leaders have denounced violence, suicide bombs, 9/11, 7/7 and many other bloody attacks by Islamist radicals (check out a long partial list here). But since there is no real hierarchy in Islam, non-Muslims don’t know who has the authority to speak out and Muslims often challenge the authority of those who do. Many of these statements end up unreported, like the trees nobody hears falling in the forest. But if a news story is written with the “first ever” tag in the lead, it gives the false impression that no other Muslim leader has ever done anything similiar before.
Second, the clause “which declares terrorists as disbelievers” is difficult terrain. It’s hard for a journalist to verify that this is the first such fatwa as no central directory of such edicts worldwide exists. Moreover, who has the authority in Islam to declare someone a non-Muslim? Al-Qaeda has been criticised for declaring its enemies non-Muslims (an act known as takfir) and either killing them or urging other Muslims to kill them.
In fact, an important group of mainstream Muslim scholars got together in 2004 to issue the Amman Message that denounces the use of takfir. On the website of the Amman Message is a list of scholars endorsing it. Among those listed under Pakistan is none other than al-Qadri…
Another problem is that ul-Qadri issued an earlier, 150-page Urdu version of his fatwa last December and got a tepid reception — Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik welcomed it as “a positive development” and Pakistani media – see The News here — seem to have given it only short routine coverage. Maybe they’re suffering from a fatwa overload there.
great work by Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri. we proud of Al-Qadri.
from Global News Journal:
Southeast Asia’s Islamists try the domino theory
Photo: Jihad book collection in Jakarta Sept.21, 2009. REUTERS/Supr
A half-century ago, Washington worried about Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to an international communist movement backed by Maoist China, and became bogged down in the Vietnam War.
Noordin Top, believed to be the mastermind behind most of the suicide bombings in Indonesia -- including the July 17 attacks on two luxury Jakarta hotels -- pronounced himself to be al Qaeda's franchise in Southeast Asia.
Top and his allies in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) aimed to create an Islamic caliphate across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. Even before the 9/11 suicide airliner attacks, they were trying to spark an Islamic revolution with ambitious plots and attacks.
Their young foot soldiers dreamed these pro-Western nations (which had banded together to form ASEAN under the U.S. military umbrella at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967) might fall like dominoes to the righteousness of an Islamic jihad. Their martyrdom to the cause would given them a blissful reward in Heaven.
But just as Communism was not the monolith it was feared to be in the 1960s -- China and the Soviet Union had split for one thing -- so too has the Southeast Asian jihadist movement failed to cohere into a singular movement.
africa needs to stop being so violence toward other
african it prove how silly they are
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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