Sunni-Shi'ite Jihad Update -- this time, outside of Iraq -- from the Khaleej Times: "New militant group targeting Shi'ites in Pakistan"
ISLAMABAD -- Security agencies have expressed the apprehension that a new militant group has emerged threatening Shia leaders.
According to investigators inquiring into the assassination of Shia leader Allama Hassan Turabi, Pukhtoon militants who fought against the US-led invasion of Afghanistan have formed a new anti-Shia militant group.
Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials had learnt of the new group from interrogations of three men arrested for suspicion of involvement in the prominent Shia cleric's murder in Karachi. The FIA team, headed by its director general, Tariq Pervaiz, has sent a report to the Interior Ministry detailing its findings.
The suspects -- Sultan Mehmood alias Saifullah and Muslim, Mohammad Amin alias Khalid and Abdullah, and Mohammad Rehman alias Mani -- told investigators the group was planning suicide attacks against Shia leaders, says the report.
The new militant group is led by Mufti Ilyas and Hazrat Ali of Darra Adam Khel. Its members include men who fought against US forces in Afghanistan, and have links with Abdullah Mehsud, the militant leader responsible for the attack on Chinese engineers at the Gomal Zam Dam site, and other militants from Waziristan and Afghanistan. It also includes some women members. The report says that the new group has no links with any other militant organisation.
Paper over this one CAIR.
Hooper, who's paying your salary. Is it our jiziyah, our petrodollars ?
"The report says that the new group has no links with any other militant organisation."
Uh-huh. Y'all keep telling yourselves that.
Fine and good.
Naseem - free yourself and take precautions. They'll be coming for you too... if the Sunnis can't accept the Number Two Sect of Islam how would either of them accept you in the Number Seventy-Three? Neither of them consider you as even being on the list.
Get out - at least in your heart & mind if you can't get out any other way. Peaceful islam is a contradication in terms. Your latter-day prophet might have done some good if he'd rejected the whole of it. All your prophet has done is to put your group outside and draw a nice, red target on your heads.
Spreading peaceful interaction only works with opponents - not enemies. You are an enemy to them. The worst kind - an apostate.
Shia clerics, Shia professionals all kinds, ordinary Shia worshippers, are killed in Pakistan by Sunnis all the time. So many Sunni groups could conceivably be responsible, that sometimes it is hard to know just wich group would have done it.
Here's a typical story, about the killing of Aga Syed Mehdi, in Kashmir, last November (or was it two years ago this November?) in which a journalistic roundup of the usual suspects offers a number of possibilities:
"Many suspected of killing Shia leader
Tribune News Service
SRINAGAR, Nov 6 — Who killed senior Shia leader Aga Syed Mehdi, near here, on Friday?
A Defence Ministry spokesman claimed here on Saturday that foreign militants belonging to Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad had blasted the IED at Magam, killing Aga Syed Mehdi and five others.
“As per reports , this was the work Sipaha-e-Sahaba, a radical anti-Shia faction in Pakistan, actively supported by the Pakistani regime. The Sipaha-e-Sahaba believes in the elimination of Shias. Detailed planning for this operation was done across the Line of Control, involving activists of Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Pakistani officials,” he said.
The All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) has alleged that the “government-controlled media” tried to implicate Sipaha-e-Sahaba, an organisation which did not exist in Kashmir. “Further , the reference of inter-group clashes in Pakistan indicated that India has been trying to dub the ongoing struggle as a terrorist and communal onslaught,” an APHC spokesman said.
The Lashkar-e-Karbala, a lesser known outfit, and Hizbul Momineen were, according to a local news agency, the first to claim the responsibility of the attack. However, according to another local news agency, Hizbul Momineen chief, presently in Pakistan, has denied the involvement of his group in the killing. He had also denied having links with Lashkar-e-Karbala.
Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen , a radical militant outfit, has hailed the killing of the Shia leader. “His actions took him to bizarre end,” a spokesman of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen said here.
The police is yet to get any clues about those responsible for the killing. Aga’s killing, according to the police, cannot be directly linked to the attempt of the militants to create sectarian trouble in the valley.
Two attempts were made on the life of another senior Shia and Congress leader, Maulvi Abbas Ansari, who was a minister till last year in the Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference Government. The police here believe that such attacks were only targeted at the mainstream political leaders and not on the leaders of a particular sect."
Remember this, the next time someone dares to suggest that the Sunnis and Shi'a have always gotten along swimmingly, and it was only when those bad Americans arrived that bad things started to happen in Iraq.
It's complete nonsense.
And also complete nonsense is the Adminitation's belief that somehow the fight over power and money in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'a can conceivably be solved by "greater security" or by "reconstruction" projects or by anything at all the Americans could provide. No, and No.
The fight is over this, and nothing but this:
Who is going to rule Iraq? Will it be the Shi'a Arabs, or the Sunni Arabs? The Sunni Arabs will never acquiescence in their new role, the role that their actual percentage of the population entitles them to, and with it that share in political power and oil wealth. The Shi'a, who haven't forgotten a thing about how they were treated not only under Saddam Hussein, but under successive Sunni Arab rulers during the entire history of modern Iraq, and during the 1300-year history of Sunni persecution of the Shi'a (which gave rise, incidentally, to the notion of "taqiyya"-- a doctrine originatinig with the Shi'a, and designed to protect them not from the Americans who didn't yet exist, or any other non-Muslims, but from the Sunnis), are not about to be nice to the Sunnis.
Ahd why should they? They've managed to inveigle the Americans to get rid of Saddam Hussein, to get rid of his collaborators and command structure, to dismember his Sunni officers corps, and to provide Western, advanced training to an Iraqi "army" that is 70% Shi'a Arab, and 20% Kurd, leaving the Sunnis with 10% -- in other words, giving those Shi'a the training in military matters they needed.
And the Bush Administration is just stupid enough to leave lots of equipment behind, just the way the brilliant previous administrations loaded up the Afghanis with Stinger missiles and suchlike.
No one, not a single soul in Washington, apparently can figure out why the Iran-Iraq War was so wonderful, and so for that matter was the proxy war of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the Yemen in the early 1960s, or for that matter any of the many intra-Arab clashes of the past forty years. No one, it seems, can imagine an Iraq that would provide a constant source of tension between Sunni and Shia Arab, and furthermore, inspire or provoke such sectarian hostilities in Pakistan, Kuwait, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, where, as the article above shows, such tensions already exist, and have long been acted upon.
No, we are supposed to "deplore" and "worry about" civil war. Why? Because in the midst of this civil war, in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, somehow the "terrorists" will manage to seize control. Which ones? The Sunni "terrorists"? Why would they be able to overcome the Shi'a who make up 60-65% of the population, who have their own ruthless militias just waiting to be unchained once the Americans go? The Shi'a "terrorists"? Why would they be able to overcome the much more aggressive Sunnis, who have volunteers and materiel flowing across the border from such Sunni-populated states as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and of course, the bottomless checkbooks of Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Kuwait to fund all kinds of things, including weapons purchases.
Do you know what would happen in a "civil war" in Iraq? I don't. I don't know if the Sunins would win, or the Shi'a would win. I don't know if it would lead to a crushing of one side by the other, or low-level warfare simmering for years, possibly decades, and serving as a fault line for Sunni-Shi'a hostility and hatred.
And what's more, I don't need to know. As long as those hostilities can use up men, money, and materiel from the camp of Islam, and as long as Iraq may serve -- the way the chaos and anarchy in Gaza serves -- as a Demonstration Project of what Muslims are like when they are not under an absolute Despot capable of ruling them by fiat and fear -- the better for the growing comprehension of Islam by Infidels everywhere.
The "victory" such as it was in Iraq was set in motion by the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime. That "victory" consists not in making Iraq a Model State (model for Sunni Arabs anywhere?), but in allowing it to become a cradle and focus of sectarian and ethnic strife, and to hope that goes on forever, thereby weakening, by dividing and demoralizing, and showing up for what it is, the Camp of Islam.
Why this cannot be perceived by the obstinate Bush and his unaccountably obstinate Rumsfeld and Company, remains a mystery.