Taliban attack Pakistan amid devastating floods

Pro-Taliban Pakistani militants are trying to create a sectarian rift, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, as a new wave of violence piled pressure on a government already struggling with a flood crisis.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on two Shiite rallies that killed 33 people in Lahore on Wednesday and 65 in the city of Quetta on Friday.
The attacks ended a lull after devastating floods that affected 20 million people. Pakistani officials said before the attacks that any major violence at such a difficult time was likely to cause deep popular resentment against the militants.

On Friday, Pakistan's Taliban also threatened to launch attacks in the United States and Europe "very soon," two days after Washington added the group, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, to its "foreign terrorist organizations" list.
Malik said al-Qaida-linked militants were trying to whip up sectarianism after taking a beating in their strongholds in the country's northwest in a string of military offensives.
"Sectarianism that has been there for 62 years [since the creation of Pakistan], they stoked it again," he told reporters.
Warning that militants would launch attacks again "wherever there is a vulnerable situation," he said "they are using it as a weapon to terrorize people."
Thousands have been killed in sectarian violence by both majority Sunni and minority Shiite sects in the past two decades. Shiite violence has largely declined in recent years. The Taliban and al-Qaida are Sunnis.
"These militant groups think they can create conflict through sectarianism. But that has not happened," said political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi.


Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Taliban+attack+Pakistan+amid+devastating+floods/3484834/story.html#ixzz0yeWNF2JY