Iranian-allied Shias of jhang were cruel land owners and oppressors, many groups were born as a reaction to their evil. Later on they morphed into the monsters we see today.
REF:1
Sectrarian Conflicts in Pakistan by Moonis Ahmar
pu.edu.pk/pdf
REF:2
Pakistan: Eye of the Storm
By Owen Bennett Jones
Excerpt from pages 22-23:
[------------------------------------] In July 1980, emboldened
by the Shia-led revolution in Iran, tens of thousands of Pakistani
Shias stormed the Federal Secretariat building in Islamabad. And when
Zia backed down, accepting the Shia demand to be exempt from Zakat,
he provoked a furious response from the Sunni community.
Relations between the Sunnis and Shias deteriorated rapidly and, by
the end of the 1980s, well-armed extremists from both sides were murdering
each other on a regular basis. Initially, the Shia’s most powerful
militant organisation was Tehrik-e-Jafria Pakistan (TJP). When the TJP
moved towards the pursuit of constitutional politics, Sipah-e-Mohammed
Pakistan (SMP) took its place. In the early and mid-1990s the SMP won
a reputation as one of the most violent organisations in all of Pakistan
and it has been blamed for a whole series of attacks on Sunni militant
activists.
Sunnis militants also began to organise themselves. In 1985 Sipah-e-
Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) was established in the Punjabi city of Jhang and
it demanded that the Shias be declared non-Muslims. The organisation
grew with remarkable speed. This was in part because it drew on the
discontent of Sunni peasants who felt exploited by the Shia landlords
who have traditionally owned large estates near Jhang.
The SSP’s direct
challenge to these landlords enabled them to attract support not only
from landless farm workers but also from the urban lower middle classes
which also resented the power of the local aristocracy. By 1994 the SSP
had become one of the largest religious parties in Punjab. As well as
being an exceptionally violent organisation, it also moved into electoral
politics and managed to win seats in the National Assembly.
The SSP had become a formidable force in sectarian politics. But in
1995 a group of Sunni militants led by a senior SSP activist, Riaz Basra,
split away from the SSP to form Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The relationship
between the SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was ambiguous and it was
never clear to what extent the two organisations were working in tandem.
It was surely significant, however, that whenever an SSP activist
was killed or arrested, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi vowed to exact revenge.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi always had an explicitly military structure – Basra
was its commander-in-chief – and, unlike most other sectarian groups
in Pakistan, it did not hesitate to admit responsibility for the assassinations
that it carried out, including attacks on many Iranian nationals
in Pakistan.
In January 1999 Lashkar-e-Jhangvi stepped up its military campaign
by attempting to assassinate the then Pakistani prime minster, Nawaz
Sharif. The plot failed because a passer-by accidentally detonated a
bomb that had been placed under a bridge that Sharif was due to drive
over an hour later. Two months later, a Lashkar-e-Jhangvi activist was
arrested near an area where Sharif ’s helicopter was due to land. Police
became suspicious because he was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.
The battle-lines between the Sunni sectarian groups and the government
were now drawn and throughout 1999 there were thirty-six extra judicial
killings of activists from the SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The
police were told that anyone who managed to arrest or kill [------------]
