GOT JIHAD? KILL, BABY, KILL..

Those who are slaughtering their way through the population claim to justify their killing of innocent civilians by saying that that our military has joined forces with the Americans and that this legitimises the attacks here – a twisting of logic that beggars belief

Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Around the Net
Source & Credit: The News, Pakistan | Editorial

The Body Count | December 24, 2009

PAKISTAN - In the 213 days between April 1 and November 5, 106 policemen and 1,039 civilians were killed in suicide and IED attacks and 220 policemen and 2,309 civilians injured. The figures for the police are accurate, that for the civilians probably an under-reporting, but it is difficult to say by how much. In this period there were 51 suicide attacks and 325 attacks using improvised explosive devices.

Peshawar and Nowshera bore the brunt of the suicide bombings – 16 – with no other location even getting close to double figures. Likewise in Peshawar and Nowshera 40 policemen died and 37 were injured, and 303 civilians died with around 900 recorded as wounded – again probably an under-reporting. There are no reports of police or civilian casualties from Sindh and the war being fought is, for the moment, confined to upper Punjab, NWFP and the northeast of the country generally.

The consolidated list of incidents for a period only slightly exceeding seven months presents us with an unequivocal picture of the struggle we face. Most of the dead and injured were Pakistanis (there must have been foreign nationals among them but they are not separately recorded) and there was not a single American soldier, not one. Those who are slaughtering their way through the population claim to justify their killing of innocent civilians by saying that that our military has joined forces with the Americans and that this legitimises the attacks here – a twisting of logic that beggars belief. Twisted perhaps; but powerfully persuasive to those who support the Taliban that regard civilian casualties as little more than acceptable collateral damage in a wider war.

The reality is that there are substantial portions of the clerical cohort who refuse to condemn suicide bombing. The hold that extremism has on the country is broad and deep, and in the absence of an organised moderate political force outside of the established parties there seems to be no impediment to the gradual slide towards yet more bombs and bloodshed.


Read here: The body count