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It has been a long night for Ahmed Chinoy. Tired but animated, the businessman tells how he helped co-ordinate a shootout against yet another kidnapping gang in Karachi – the engine of the Pakistani economy and the world’s most violent megacity – before going to bed at 7am.
The kidnappers were no ordinary criminals but Sunni Muslim extremists of the Pakistan Taliban, according to Mr Chinoy, who explains over a hurried lunch of deep-pan pizza how his Citizens-Police Liaison Committee helped track them to their hide-out and free two of their four captives. Police say they shot dead three of the abductors. “The element of militancy in the kidnapping is on the rise now,” says Mr Chinoy.
Last year was the city’s worst on record for kidnappings for ransom – 173 were reported and an unknown number ended after secret payments. Raids by army rangers have slightly improved the statistics this year but in Karachi, a chaotic port city on the Arabian Sea of over 22m inhabitants, the state long ago ceded its authority to thuggish politicians, ethnic and religious bigots and exceptionally brutal criminals.
The categories used by the Human Rights Commission to tally Karachi’s known killings – 3,251 last year, also a record – include “children killed in bomb blasts”, “men burnt to death”, “stray bullets” and “sectarian killings” as well as “abducted and killed”.
Kidnapping in Karachi is usually for money but an audacious attack this month on the city’s international airport, claimed by the Taliban, has dramatically exposed the growing importance of ideology and religion in Karachi’s troubles. Over the past five years, Sunni extremists have tightened their grasp on parts of the city, which handles the international trade of both Pakistan and Afghanistan and accounts for more than half of Pakistan’s tax revenues. Yasin Lakhani, a stockbroker and former chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange, describes the city as Pakistan’s “economic jugular”.
The ever-present violence and increasing instability of Karachi – sometimes known as “mini-Pakistan” because of its mix of Sindhis, Mohajirs (the Muslims who fled from what is now India during the chaotic partition of the British Raj in 1947), Pashtuns, Balochs, Punjabis, Afghans and more – bodes ill for the country as a whole as it struggles to revive its economy and resist the onslaught of Sunni Muslim extremists who oppose everything from girls’ education to the polio vaccine.
“More than ever, Karachi seems to be on the verge of a general implosion, as the struggle for the city disseminates into myriad battles for turf and rents,” writes Laurent Gayer, the French researcher, in Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City . “Because of Karachi’s enduring centrality in the national economy but also because of the city’s increasingly complex ethnic mix, the country will not pull itself back from the brink without bringing Karachi on board.”
The Karachi airport attack temporarily closed the country’s main international gateway, left bullet holes in two passenger aircraft and ended in the deaths of more than 30 people, including members of the security forces and the 10 militants, thought to be Uzbeks from the facial features of their corpses.
It also triggered Pakistan’s biggest military offensive against the Taliban. Aircraft, backed by 35,000 troops, have conducted daily bombing raids on suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda hide-outs in the North Waziristan region along the Afghan border. In return, the Taliban demanded that “all foreign investors, airline and multinational corporations” leave Pakistan and threatened to attack the Punjabi heartland of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister.
On Tuesday, a woman passenger was killed when gunmen fired at a Pakistani Airbus landing in Peshawar on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Cathay Pacific has announced the suspension of all flights to Pakistan, and other foreign airlines stopped flying to Peshawar.
Two days after the Karachi airport clash, events thousands of kilometres to the northwest became the talk of the city when Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) captured the Iraqi town of Mosul and advanced on Baghdad. Investors, Pakistani intelligence officers and security experts have warily taken note of the similarities – ideological and operational – between Isis forces in Syria and Iraq and those of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in south and central Asia.
“We’ve got a pretty alarming situation and a race against time. We must dominate North Waziristan as soon as possible,” says Ikram Sehgal, a former army officer and pilot who owns a big security firm in Karachi. The collapse of the Iraqi forces in Mosul has “scared the shit” out of Pakistani leaders who fear the same will happen to the Afghan army following the withdrawal of most US forces next year, leaving neighbouring Pakistan exposed.
A decade ago – before the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001 and the flight of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the secret home in Pakistan where he was eventually assassinated by US Navy Seals – most of Pakistan was safe and accessible to foreign visitors. But the abduction and beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal in Karachi in 2002 while investigating al-Qaeda was another sign that a new brand of radicalism was taking hold in the country. Today, Baluchistan and the tribal areas along the Afghan border are either closed by the security forces or too dangerous.
Karachi: Under siege - FT.com
The kidnappers were no ordinary criminals but Sunni Muslim extremists of the Pakistan Taliban, according to Mr Chinoy, who explains over a hurried lunch of deep-pan pizza how his Citizens-Police Liaison Committee helped track them to their hide-out and free two of their four captives. Police say they shot dead three of the abductors. “The element of militancy in the kidnapping is on the rise now,” says Mr Chinoy.
Last year was the city’s worst on record for kidnappings for ransom – 173 were reported and an unknown number ended after secret payments. Raids by army rangers have slightly improved the statistics this year but in Karachi, a chaotic port city on the Arabian Sea of over 22m inhabitants, the state long ago ceded its authority to thuggish politicians, ethnic and religious bigots and exceptionally brutal criminals.
The categories used by the Human Rights Commission to tally Karachi’s known killings – 3,251 last year, also a record – include “children killed in bomb blasts”, “men burnt to death”, “stray bullets” and “sectarian killings” as well as “abducted and killed”.
Kidnapping in Karachi is usually for money but an audacious attack this month on the city’s international airport, claimed by the Taliban, has dramatically exposed the growing importance of ideology and religion in Karachi’s troubles. Over the past five years, Sunni extremists have tightened their grasp on parts of the city, which handles the international trade of both Pakistan and Afghanistan and accounts for more than half of Pakistan’s tax revenues. Yasin Lakhani, a stockbroker and former chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange, describes the city as Pakistan’s “economic jugular”.
The ever-present violence and increasing instability of Karachi – sometimes known as “mini-Pakistan” because of its mix of Sindhis, Mohajirs (the Muslims who fled from what is now India during the chaotic partition of the British Raj in 1947), Pashtuns, Balochs, Punjabis, Afghans and more – bodes ill for the country as a whole as it struggles to revive its economy and resist the onslaught of Sunni Muslim extremists who oppose everything from girls’ education to the polio vaccine.
“More than ever, Karachi seems to be on the verge of a general implosion, as the struggle for the city disseminates into myriad battles for turf and rents,” writes Laurent Gayer, the French researcher, in Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City . “Because of Karachi’s enduring centrality in the national economy but also because of the city’s increasingly complex ethnic mix, the country will not pull itself back from the brink without bringing Karachi on board.”
The Karachi airport attack temporarily closed the country’s main international gateway, left bullet holes in two passenger aircraft and ended in the deaths of more than 30 people, including members of the security forces and the 10 militants, thought to be Uzbeks from the facial features of their corpses.
It also triggered Pakistan’s biggest military offensive against the Taliban. Aircraft, backed by 35,000 troops, have conducted daily bombing raids on suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda hide-outs in the North Waziristan region along the Afghan border. In return, the Taliban demanded that “all foreign investors, airline and multinational corporations” leave Pakistan and threatened to attack the Punjabi heartland of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister.
On Tuesday, a woman passenger was killed when gunmen fired at a Pakistani Airbus landing in Peshawar on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Cathay Pacific has announced the suspension of all flights to Pakistan, and other foreign airlines stopped flying to Peshawar.
Two days after the Karachi airport clash, events thousands of kilometres to the northwest became the talk of the city when Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) captured the Iraqi town of Mosul and advanced on Baghdad. Investors, Pakistani intelligence officers and security experts have warily taken note of the similarities – ideological and operational – between Isis forces in Syria and Iraq and those of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in south and central Asia.
“We’ve got a pretty alarming situation and a race against time. We must dominate North Waziristan as soon as possible,” says Ikram Sehgal, a former army officer and pilot who owns a big security firm in Karachi. The collapse of the Iraqi forces in Mosul has “scared the shit” out of Pakistani leaders who fear the same will happen to the Afghan army following the withdrawal of most US forces next year, leaving neighbouring Pakistan exposed.
A decade ago – before the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001 and the flight of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the secret home in Pakistan where he was eventually assassinated by US Navy Seals – most of Pakistan was safe and accessible to foreign visitors. But the abduction and beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal in Karachi in 2002 while investigating al-Qaeda was another sign that a new brand of radicalism was taking hold in the country. Today, Baluchistan and the tribal areas along the Afghan border are either closed by the security forces or too dangerous.
Karachi: Under siege - FT.com
