Islam is “a faith known for its diversity,” says Barack Obama, and this proves it. Women, too, can lay claim to the Qur’an’s guarantee of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).
“Female suicide bomber hits Pakistan, seven dead,” from Channel News Asia, August 11 (thanks to Twostellas):
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A female suicide attacker and a handcart bomb targeted Pakistani police on Thursday, killing seven people in the first deadly attacks to hit the northwest during Ramadan, officials said.
The city of Peshawar, where the bombs struck, is on the frontline of a Taliban insurgency and borders Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt that Washington calls the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
It was only the third time police have confirmed a woman suicide attacker in the nuclear-armed country of 167 million where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked bombers have killed 4,500 people since 2007, destabilising the government.
Dozens were wounded in Thursday’s attacks, carried out several hours apart in the Lahori Gate area of Peshawar, a teeming city of 2.5 million, targeting first a police van and secondly a police checkpost.
“This was a female suicide bomber aged around 17 or 18 who threw a hand grenade on the police checkpost, 20 metres away from the site of the first blast, and then blew herself up,” police official Shafqat Malik told AFP….
In late June, the Pakistani Taliban claimed for the first time that a married Uzbek couple carried out a suicide attack on a police station that killed 10 officers and threatened further husband-and-wife bombings….
US officials have accused Pakistani intelligence of playing a double game with extremists, including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, in order to exert influence in Afghanistan and offset the might of arch-rival India.
Washington’s pressure on Islamabad to launch a decisive military campaign in North Waziristan, as Pakistan has conducted elsewhere in the tribal belt, has so far been ignored.
What a surprise.