Bodies are piling up in Pakistan’s largest city as it suffers one of its most violent years in history, and concern is growing that the chaos is giving greater cover for the Taliban to operate and undermining the country’s economic epicentre.
An article in the Huffington Post said Karachi has long suffered religious, sectarian and ethnic strife, wherein armed wings of political parties battle for control of the city, Sunnis and Shias die in tit-for-tat sectarian killings, and the Taliban attack banks and kill police officers.
It feared the violence could easily worsen with the election due next year.
Data with the Citizens’ Police Liaison Committee, a civic organisation that works with police to fight crime, revealed that the violence claimed 1,938 lives as of late November, the deadliest year since 1994, when the CPLC began collecting figures.
Police tallies put the dead at 1,897 through mid-October. “The Taliban seem to be taking advantage of the chaos to expand their presence in the city, a safe distance from areas of Pakistani army operations and US drone strikes,” the article said.
During recent Supreme Court hearings, judges ordered authorities to investigate reports that as many as 8,000 Taliban members were in the city.
Security officials say the Taliban raise money in Karachi through bank and ATM robberies, kidnappings and extortion, and are recruiting as well.
The head of the city’s Central Investigation Department, Chaudhry Aslam, who is tasked with tracking down militants, said the Taliban had killed at least 24 of his officers this year.
Regular citizens are often caught in the middle.
Samina Waseem says her son Aatir, 21, went out on May 22 to get his phone fixed. Three days later she found his body in the morgue with a gunshot wound through his head.
She’s convinced he was killed because he belonged to the Mohajir community – the people who moved from India to newly created Pakistan when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947.
“Part of Karachi’s problem is that since 1947 its population has mushroomed from 435,000 to 18 million. The metropolis ranges from the high-end neighborhoods of Clifton where people live behind bougainvillea-covered walls and eat arugula and fig salads at posh restaurants, to concrete block houses on the dusty outskirts. There migrants move in from the rugged northwest where the US is waging its war with the Taliban, and from the flood-prone plains of Sindh,” the article said.
That population growth is marked by spurts of violence. Currently the overarching struggle appears to be between two powerful forces. One is the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the city’s dominant force, which represents Urdu-speaking Mohajirs. The other is the Awami National Party. It represents Pashtuns whose numbers are increasing as their ethnic kin flee the northwest.
The MQM prides itself on being the protector of middle-class, liberal, secular values in a country where extremism and religious conservatism hold sway. It says the Taliban began moving into Karachi in force, driven south by a military offensive in 2009, and is wreaking havoc while hiding among the Pashtun. “We are trying our level best to keep Karachi alive,” Engr Nasir Jamal of the MQM told Huffington Post.
The ANP and the Pashtuns believe the MQM is nervous that Pashtun population growth will undermine their hold on Karachi, and that it is targeting Pashtuns to intimidate them. The Pashtuns acknowledge that the Taliban are a big problem, including for them, because the terror group has also been killing its members. But they say the MQM exaggerates the problem.
“The battle lines are visible across the city. MQM flags and posters blanket the Urdu-speaking neighbourhoods, and red flags and graffiti mark ANP territory in the poorer, blue-collar neighbourhoods,” the article said. “Theirs is hardly the only conflict. The Pakistan People’s Party, which heads the national government, says 450 of its activists have been killed over the last four-and-a-half years.
