Adapting to one of al Qaeda's trademarked acts of terrorism, the Taliban sent a suicide bomber to the funeral of a local Pakistani militia leader's funeral and the end result of the attack was 37 people were killed. The message is simple - disband your militia and support the Taliban or you will all die.
From the report at The Long War Journal:
A Taliban suicide bomber killed 37 mourners at a funeral in northwestern Pakistan in the latest attack in the insurgency-wracked country. The target of the attack was a tribe that has resisted the Taliban's advance in the area.
According to reports, a teenage wrapped in a shawl detonated his vest at the funeral in the village of Adizai in the Matni area of Peshawar.
"People had gathered and had just started praying when a boy walked in and blew himself up," a survivor told Geo News.
The villagers were attending the funeral a relative of Hakeem Khan, a Pashtun tribal leader who has raised a local militia in the Matni area in Peshawar to battle the Taliban. More than 50 people were also wounded in the blast.
The Taliban claimed credit for the suicide attack, and denounced the locally raised militias, or lashkars, as instruments of US policy.
When we saw these tactics by al Qaeda in Iraq on the Sunni awakenings, the members of the awakening tribes got even more incensed and doubled their efforts against al Qaeda but unfortunately, in Pakistan, these kind of attacks by the Taliban have been effective in often disbanding these "lashkars" or militias.
At the same time, in Pakistan, we have long see many more sympathizers to the Taliban throughout villages in the countryside so when militias try to form some sort of defense, they often have moles inside of them that feed info to the Taliban.
Taliban suicide bomber kills 37 at funeral in Peshawar
A Taliban suicide bomber killed 37 mourners at a funeral in northwestern Pakistan in the latest attack in the insurgency-wracked country. The target of the attack was a tribe that has resisted the Taliban's advance in the area.
According to reports, a teenage wrapped in a shawl detonated his vest at the funeral in the village of Adizai in the Matni area of Peshawar.
"People had gathered and had just started praying when a boy walked in and blew himself up," a survivor told Geo News.
The villagers were attending the funeral a relative of Hakeem Khan, a Pashtun tribal leader who has raised a local militia in the Matni area in Peshawar to battle the Taliban. More than 50 people were also wounded in the blast.
The Taliban claimed credit for the suicide attack, and denounced the locally raised militias, or lashkars, as instruments of US policy.
"These lashkars are raised to create chaos instead of maintaining peace," Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman, told Reuters. "The lashkars and the army are fighting us at the behest of the Americans. We will continue attacks on them."
The Taliban have targeted the lashkar in Matni in the past. On Nov. 8, 2009, a suicide bomber killed 13 people, including the mayor of Adizai in a blast at a market. The mayor had organized a lashkar to battle the Taliban.
Local Pakistani tribal leaders have raised lashkars to oppose the spread of the Taliban throughout the northwest. The Taliban have countered by ruthlessly attacking tribal meetings and killing senior leaders. The last major attack against tribal leaders took place in December 2010, when a suicide bomber killed 50 people and wounded more than 100 in an attack on a government official's office in Ghalalnai, the administrative seat of the tribal agency of Mohmand
Over the past several years, the Taliban have savagely attacked tribal leaders who oppose their rule in the tribal areas and the greater northwest. Tribal opposition has been violently attacked and defeated in Peshawar, Dir, Arakzai, Khyber, and Swat. Suicide bombers have struck at tribal meetings held at mosques, schools, hotels, and homes [see LWJ report, Anti-Taliban tribal militia leader assassinated in Pakistan's northwest, for more information on the difficulties of raising tribal lashkars in Pakistan's northwest].
Today's suicide attack is the latest in a string of Taliban suicide attacks, bombings, and armed attacks against civilians, the government, and security forces since mid-January. The terror groups have carried out six major attacks in the past week. Yesterday, a car bomb at a gas station in Faisalabad killed 30 people. On March 4, a suicide bomber killed nine people in a bombing at a mosque in Nowshera. On March 3, a suicide bomber killed nine Pakistanis in an attack on a police outpost in Hangu, and six police were killed in an ambush in the tribal agency of Bara. And on March 2, the Punjabi Taliban and al Qaeda assassinated Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs in a shooting outside his mother's home in Islamabad.
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