A deadly attack on Pakistan's Shiite Muslims was aimed at persuading President Pervez Musharraf to soften his crackdown on extremist Islamic groups and weaken his support for the US, analysts said.
Suicide attackers killed 44 Shiites with guns and grenades and then blew themselves up on Tuesday in the southwestern city of Quetta near the Afghanistan border, turning a celebration of one the holiest Shiite days into a bloodbath.
PHOTO: AFP
"The attack was specifically linked to the heightened operation against militants in the tribal areas," political analyst Nasim Zehra said.
Musharraf -- a staunch supporter of Washington's "war on terror" -- has banned extremist Islamic groups, sectarian and Kashmiri separatist organizations, and hunted down al-Qaeda sus-pects in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistani forces fanned out across lawless tribal areas along the Afghan border last week and detained 20 suspects.
Analyst and commentator Ayaz Amir said that the aim of Tuesday's attack was to send a message to Musharraf's government.
"In this case, sectarianism is a form of anti-government protest," he said. "When you want unrest in Pakistan, you are putting pressure on the government."
Two assassination attempts against Musharraf last December linked to radical Islamic fighters angered by his policies have underlined the scale of the challenge militants pose.
The Quetta attack, blamed on majority Sunni Muslims, was the worst of its kind in Pakistan since last July's suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in the same city killed 57 people and coincided with a series of bomb blasts in the Iraqi cities of Kerbala and Baghdad that killed at least 169 worshippers.
Pakistani analysts said the attacks were unlikely to be directly connected but did appear to have a similar purpose.
"One link is there, and that is to create unrest and anarchy in both countries," Amir said.
But British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the attacks were clearly linked.
AL-QAEDA INVOLVEMENT QUESTIONED
The US-appointed Governing Council in Iraq has blamed the violence there on a suspected member of the militantly Sunni al-Qaeda network.
Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is believed to be a target of the coordinated Pakistani and US operations along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier close to Quetta. Washington says the Saudi born bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide hijack attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Analysts say al-Qaeda might not be directly involved in the Quetta attack, but Sunni extremist groups are ideologically close to the group and its Taliban allies, whose rule over Afghanistan was ended by a US-led alliance in 2001.
"The sectarian extremists who are against Shiites follow the same interpretation of Islam which is followed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban," said Mehdi Hasan, a Pakistan political commentator.
The banned Sunni sectarian group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, known to have links to al-Qaeda, was initially blamed for the attack.
Last September, Pakistani police named the suspected mastermind of the July Quetta attack as a relative of an al-Qaeda member convicted of a 1993 bombing at New York's World Trade Center.
Pakistan has arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the last two-and-a-half years and banned extremist groups, including some involved in violence in Indian Kashmir.
Most of the outlawed militant groups are Sunni Muslims. Shiites make up some 15 percent of the overwhelmingly Sunni Pakistan, which has a population of around 150 million.
`Soft targets'
Analysts said the assailants in Pakistan and Iraq hit "soft targets," striking on a day when Shiites were celebrating "Ashura" or the 10th day of a holy period known as Muharram.
During Ashura Shiites take to the streets beating their chests and flogging themselves with steel flails in memory of Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, killed and beheaded in Iraq some 1,300 years ago.
"Muharram processions are extremely vulnerable targets," Zehra said.
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