Caricatures de Mahomet – Pakistan: deux cinémas incendiés
TRIBUNE DE GENÈVE: Les Occidentaux s'attendaient vendredi, jour de la grande prière dans les pays musulmans, à de nouvelles protestations contre le film anti-islam, attisées par la publication en France de caricatures de Mahomet.

Deux cinémas de la grande ville du nord-ouest pakistanais Peshawar ont été incendiés vendredi par des manifestants en colère contre la diffusion sur internet d'un film américain anti-islam, a indiqué la police. Un manifestant a été blessé par un tir du gardien d'un des cinémas qui a ouvert le feu sur la foule ayant saccagé et incendié la salle, a indiqué un responsable de la police.

Environ 250 manifestants se sont ensuite dirigés vers un deuxième cinéma, le Shama, qui diffuse des films jugés obscènes par certains radicaux, qu'ils ont aussi saccagé et incendié.

Des heurts mineurs ont aussi éclaté à Rawalpindi, ville jumelle d'Islamabad, selon un photographe de l'AFP sur place. » | ats/Newsnet | vendredi 21 septembre 2012

Pakistani Singer Ghazala Javed Shot Dead
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: A glamorous young Pakistani pop singer, who was forced to record her songs in Dubai after being threatened by the Taliban, has been shot dead in an apparent honour killing.

Ghazala Javed, 24, was shot six times by gunmen on a motorbike in the north-western city of Peshawar, according to police officers.

They said they believed her ex-husband was responsible rather than the Islamic extremists who had blighted her career with brutally-enforced bans on singing on dancing.

She was killed alongside her father as she left a beauty salon.

“Two men on a motorbike sprayed bullets and fled leaving them in a pool of blood,” said Dilawar Bangash, a senior police officer. » | Rob Crilly, Islamabad | Tuesday, June 19, 2012

THE TIMES OF INDIA: Pashto singer Ghazala Javed and her father shot dead in Pakistan » | PTI | Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Mosque Blast Kills 9 in Pakistan
Mar 4 - A bomb explodes in a mosque after Friday prayers in Pakistan's Peshawar province, killing at least nine people and injuring over 30. Travis Brecher reports. Travis Brecher reports

Attentats – Réactions : Les frappes terroristes au Pakistan "inquiètent" Washington
Robert Gibbs, porte-parole, a exprimé la "profonde inquiétude" de la Maison-Banche, après les attaques meurtrières de lundi dans le nord-ouest du Pakistan. Photo : Le Point
LE POINT: La Maison Blanche a exprimé lundi sa "profonde inquiétude" après l'attentat suicide qui a visé le consulat des Etats-Unis à Peshawar. Les Etats-Unis condamnent cette attaque, a déclaré le porte-parole du président Barack Obama, Robert Gibbs. L'attentat a fait six morts selon la police, tandis que l'ambassade américaine, directement visée par dix à 15 hommes lourdement armés, faisait état du décès de deux gardes de sécurité pakistanais de la représentation diplomatique. >>> LePoint.fr | Lundi 05 Avril 2010

Taliban Attempt to Storm US Consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan
THE TELEGRAPH: Taliban militants armed with guns and suicide vests targeted the US consulate in Pakistan's northwestern capital and unleashed carnage at a political rally on Monday, killing 43 people.



The apparently co-ordinated attacks were the deadliest so far this year in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where the government is closely allied to the US-led war against al-Qaeda and in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The ability of heavily-armed militants to get so close to the US mission and other military installations, such as the provincial headquarters of Pakistan's premier spy agency, will raise further questions about endemic insecurity.

Up to 15 militants armed with explosives and driving in two vehicles targeted the heavily guarded US consulate in Peshawar, a city of 2.5 million on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal belt, setting off multiple explosions.

"The target was certainly the American consulate but they didn't succeed in getting there," said Pakistani police officer Ghulam Hussain.

"One of the suicide bombers blew himself up close to the gate. Police guarding the US consulate started retaliatory fire. More blasts took place. We have recovered unexploded material from four different points," he said.

Three powerful explosions and bouts of gunfire echoed through the area, where the attacks occurred at a checkpoint about 20 yards from the US consulate where heavy thick smoke spewed into the sky.

"We can confirm there has been an attack on the US consulate Peshawar facilities," US embassy spokeswoman Ariel Howard told AFP, unable to provide any details about the nature of the attack, possible damage or casualties. >>> | Easter Monday, April 05, 2010

Lethal Bomb Hits Hotel in Northwest Pakistan
Wounded men after a bombing on Tuesday outside a five-star hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan. Photo courtesy of The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES: PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Militants opened fire on security guards and rushed a small truck packed with explosives through the gates of a five-star hotel in this northwestern city on Friday, detonating a large bomb in the parking lot and killing at least 11 people and wounding 55, Pakistani officials.

The blast, which left a crater six feet deep and 15 feet wide, was powerful enough to be heard for miles, witnesses said. Television images showed parts of the hotel badly damaged by the blast and wounded people, with blood soaked clothes, being helped out of the smoke filled lobby of the hotel, the Pearl Continental, one of the few in the city that cater to Western visitors.

Guests at the time of the attack included United Nations officials and an airline crew, and five women and three foreigners were among the dead, officials said. Two United Nations World Food Program officials were wounded, one critically, a United Nations official in Pakistan said.

The attack was the most spectacular against a Western target in Pakistan since the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad, last September, which left more than 50 dead. >>> By IRFAN ASHRAF and SALMAN MASOOD | Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Pakistan Hit by Second Bombing in Two Days with Attack in Peshawar
THE TELEGRAPH: Suspected Taliban terrorists have bombed a second Pakistani city in as many days, with reports of blasts in Peshawar.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing and shooting attack in Lahore on Wednesday that claimed as many as 30 lives.

Hours later two explosions were reported in a market in the northern city of Peshawar. Initial reports said that 15 people had been wounded in the blast.

Hakimullah Mehsud, a deputy to the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, said that the Lahore attack, in which offices used by the police and the provicial headquarters of the ISI intelligence service were targeted, "was in response to the Swat operation where innocent people have been killed".

A little-known group calling itself the Taliban Movement in Punjab has also claimed responsibility for the attack. >>> Telegraph’s foreign staff and agencies, Lahore | Thursday, May 28, 2009

Pakistan – Taliban: "The Scenario Is Totally Bleak"

Alarm Grows Over Pakistan’s Failure to Halt Militant Gains
Taliban militants on Thursday outside a mosque where tribal elders and members of the Taliban met in Daggar, the main town in the Buner district of Pakistan. Photo courtesy of The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — With 400 to 500 Taliban fighters newly in control of a strategically important district just 70 miles from here, Pakistani authorities have deployed only a poorly paid and equipped constabulary force — numbering just several hundred — to the area.

The Taliban appeared to be consolidating control in the district, Buner, on Thursday after moving in and establishing checkpoints on Wednesday. Residents said Taliban militants held a meeting, or jirga, with local elders and the local administration on Thursday. The residents said the meeting yielded a truce similar to the one reached with local leaders in the Swat Valley, which resulted in the agreement by the government of President Asif Ali Zardari to allow the imposition of Islamic law there 10 days ago.

“This concession represents a serious development and reflects both the growing strength of the Pakistani Taliban and the inability of the Pakistani army to conduct successful counterinsurgency operations,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who just returned from his fifth visit to Pakistan.

The fall of Buner has raised new international alarm about the ability of the Pakistani government to fend off an unrelenting Taliban advance from the Swat Valley, where as part of the truce agreement, the Pakistani Army remains in its barracks. The Taliban have moved to within a few hours’ drive of Islamabad, the capital of this country, and the neighboring garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The Pakistani military does not have a presence in Buner, Pakistani and Western officials said. From the hills of the district, the Taliban have access to the flatlands of the district of Swabi, which lead directly to the four-lane highway that connects Islamabad and Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, where much of the Pakistani Taliban operate. >>> By Jane Perlez and Zubair Shah | Thursday, April 23, 2009

Rageh Omaar on Why the West Should Fear the Taliban and al-Qaeda's Hold on Pakistan
THE TELEGRAPH: Stronghold of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the wild and lawless tribal border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan forms the crucial battleground in the war on terror. Rageh Omaar reports from the front line.

Supporters of Pro-Taliban cleric Sufi Muhammad march in Swat's main city of Mingora, Photo (AP) courtesy of The Telegraph
”Over the past two years, I have noticed that there is such a hatred of anything to do with the West throughout much of the tribal areas that the region has changed dramatically…

…Pakistan represents the first realistic prospect for a jihadist movement to capture a nation-state, or at the very least to control large parts of it. It would, in effect, mean that militants would have something approaching a mini-state within the country where the central government's power and influence would be non-existent, and from which they could plan and launch attacks beyond its borders. And Pakistan is not just any nation-state at threat from militant groups, but one that has nuclear weapons, a large population and economic resources; one that borders a vulnerable failed state in Afghanistan where tens of thousands of Nato forces are stationed; and one that also has as its neighbours two emerging economic superpowers, China and India. What is more, Pakistan has a long coastline open to the most economically important stretch of waterway in the world, the Gulf, from which hundreds of tankers supply oil-hungry economies. It is a nightmare scenario from which no country is immune. None of us will escape the consequences of a situation where large parts of Pakistan are politically, militarily and economically controlled by jihadists." – Rageh Omaar

The stark mountainous northern regions of Pakistan's tribal areas are among the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Yet as Barack Obama's newly appointed special envoy to the region, the famously tough and straight-talking diplomat Richard Holbrooke, has said, Pakistan is the country that scares President Obama and keeps him awake at night more than any other.

On my assignments to Pakistan in the past two years, it has been hard to believe the country's nightmare could get any worse. It has been heartbreaking to see this nation of more than 170 million people convulsed by political violence that its government seems increasingly incapable of halting. From the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the almost weekly suicide bomb attacks that go unnoticed by the outside world, every strike by the militants is more audacious than the previous one.

The ambush of the Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore at the beginning of this month came at the same time that the four main Taliban groups in Pakistan announced their decision to unite their forces in a concerted military campaign against Nato and government forces in neighbouring Afghanistan. Cricket, as many have observed, is one of the few cultural and sporting pastimes in which all Pakistanis, regardless of class, regional, ethnic or sectarian traditions, can unite around. It is a sport that both the religiously conservative and the Westernised elite enjoy. The aim of the militant attack on Lahore was to undermine this; to make the point that nothing is immune from political violence and that the Taliban's vision for Pakistan is an absolutist one with no room for anything Western, or anything that isn't derived from their literal interpretation of Islam.

More and more of Pakistan is slipping beyond the control of the government. As the Lahore attack showed, even the centres of major cities are vulnerable. Nowhere is the absence of the rule of law more evident than the north-west of Pakistan. The region is officially known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a clunky but accurate description of this vast expanse of nearly 11,000 square miles, home to an estimated seven million people whose first loyalty is not to Pakistan but to their tribal community. As its name indicates, this region is nominally administered by the Pakistani government but it has been autonomous and unconquered for centuries. >>> By Rageh Omaar | Thursday, March 19, 2009

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