The eerie silence along the narrow laneway of Karim Pura Bazaar, in Peshawar's old city, is deafening. Something is missing, and the absence weighs on the few shopkeepers brave enough to open for business. On any other Friday, after the obligatory afternoon prayers, the rows of tailor shops here would be doing a brisk business. But not today. A few laneways over, in Kabari Bazaar, one of dozens of electronics districts in the capital of Pakistan's restive North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the charred and mangled remains of shops offer a glimpse into what has happened: a day earlier, two bombs hidden in motorcycles exploded there, killing five and injuring dozens more. In the aftermath, much of the old city's famous bazaar district has remained closed.
A few hundred kilometres to the north in Swat, the Pakistani army is proving to the world that it has what it takes to defeat the Taliban threat. They have retaken Mingora, Swat's formerly picturesque main city, after a massive offensive lasting more than a week. The few reports coming out of there, even through the filters of military-guided media tours, show a city in ruins, virtually cleared of its residents and lacking any of the basic necessities: food, water, electricity, medical facilities. For the millions of people displaced by the fighting, there is nothing to return to"”like the Kabari Bazaar, their world is in ruins.
The fighting in Swat is not over. A new offensive has begun in Charbagh, just north of Mingora, and once that is over"”sometime this week, according to military officials"”Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has promised to shift the focus to another front in the war against Islamic militancy: the Waziristan region of the Tribal Areas. There, a June 1 kidnapping of around 80 college students and teachers by Taliban fighters has shaken Pakistanis. (Initial, erroneous reports said more than 500 were abducted. Though the military claimed to have freed all but one student by the next day, other reports said that some students were still being held.) Civilians have become targets, pawns in the battle between secular government forces and radical Islamists for control of their country.
There is no doubting that Pakistan is in the midst of a civil war, with all of the fear that breeds. Under massive international pressure to end the Taliban scourge on their soil, the government seems committed to finishing this battle. But the Taliban cannot be counted out. On May 27, a major blast in Lahore, targeting the offices of Pakistan's security services, killed 24 and injured another 200. Peshawar is particularly vulnerable. Since May 22, at least four bombs have ripped through the city, killed some 22 people and injuring hundreds more. Like Baghdad during the height of its sectarian violence, Peshawar now features a deadly mix of criminals, extremists and agents provocateurs. The U.S. government has warned its citizens to stay away, and Pakistani authorities have banned the foreign press from coming to the city for fear of having to deal with a Daniel Pearl-like incident.
"There is no security in Peshawar,"� says Syed Aqil Shah, a senior member of the NWFP provincial parliament. "We have too little police, who are under-trained and under-equipped. They can barely handle criminal activities, let alone trained militants."� Security services in the city are now preparing for an assault by militants: streets have been blocked off and numerous checkpoints set up at vulnerable locations. Still, for Pakistan's political elite, there is the comfort of armed security guards and fortified offices. For civilians, there is only confusion. "Everyone is living in fear for their lives,"� says Khan Bahadur, a 50-year-old electronics shop owner in Peshawar's Kabari Bazaar.
For Bahadur, the consequences of the recent violence have been all too tragic. At 6 p.m. on May 28, he received a call from a friend at his home in a village near the Kyber Tribal Agency, on the outskirts of Peshawar, telling him there had been a bomb blast near his shop. When he phoned his brother, who was at the scene, he was told that his 17-year-old son was dead, a second son, 18, was injured, and a third, Izzatullah, 21, was missing.
At the blast site, Bahadur's shop, which he'd inherited from his father, had been reduced to rubble in the narrow alleyway where a bomb had been left in one of the two motorcycles. When this reporter arrived on the scene, Bahadur's fellow businessmen and friends were frantically digging through the debris, searching for the body of the missing son. Bahadur's brother, Fazli Rabi, only slightly injured, looked on in a state of shock. The conversation among terrified onlookers revolved around a single question: who could have carried out such a crime? There were no police or any other security services in the area. The dead were all civilians.
When the search turned up nothing except a shoe belonging to the missing Izzatullah, Fazli Rabi, accompanied by a few of his friends, went to the Lady Reading Hospital, a 10-minute walk from the blast site. There, the scene was chaotic: distraught family members searching for their own missing loved ones, ambulances struggling to make their way through the crowd as they brought in the wounded and the dead. A group of men had gathered at the gate leading to the underground morgue. Fazli Rabi pushed past them.
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