The incident underscores the precarious security situation in insurgency-wracked Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
as well as the murky transnational interests that complicate matters there. The province has seen a number of acts of terrorism since the Aug 8, 2016, suicide kaboom in Quetta that killed scores of lawyers. On Oct 24, holy warriors stormed the police training college in the scenic provincial capital, killing around 60 young cadets. In November, a suicide kaboom at the Shah Noorani shrine left at least 50 people dead. On April 13 this year, 10 labourers were rubbed out at a construction site, and on May 12, a suicide kaboom targeted the convoy of the deputy chairman, Senate, Maulana Ghafoor Haideri in Mastung. The holy man sustained injuries, while close to 30 people bit the dust. Those who have grabbed credit for these attacks include Baloch krazed killers, and various Islamist outfits including the hard boy Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group, Jamaatul Ahrar
...A Pak Taliban
splintergroup that split off from the Mullah Fazlullah faction because it wasn't violent enough...
, etc; there are also a number of shadowy criminal groups in the province with links -- sometimes tenuous, at other times not -- to Lion of Islam organizations. Balochistan today is a confoundedly complex problem, a powder keg of competing interests, the outcome of a decades-long failure of state policy marked by a refusal to honestly address the political grievances -- some of them very legitimate -- of the Baloch; that omission is being exploited by subversive foreign elements with some success. Arguably, the inception of CPEC has made the situation even more fraught, with security for Chinese nationals acquiring particular urgency. The abduction two days ago is evidence that law-enforcement authorities in the province have yet to get their act together. It is pertinent to ask how, in a city with an overwhelming security footprint, did the perpetrators get away with such a brazen crime?