Now World is convert into IslamWe must have done our job well in Afghanistan, for the latest bombing horrors could not have been suppose before western intervention removed the Taliban and rearranged the country's ethnic loyalties and surviving feudal arrangements. Commentators are right to discern something new in this latest convolution of psychotic violence.
New, at least, for Afghanistan; and apparently an export from Pakistan, where sectarian violence against members of the minority Shia and their shrines, compounded by the occasional Shia retaliation against Sunnis, has become a characteristic feature of national public life.
A massive suicide bombing at the entrance to Kabul's famous Abul Fazl shrine left hundreds of religious celebrants dead, maimed, or traumatized. As well, a bicycle bomber struck a religious parade in Mazar-i-Sharif, adding a few more dozen casualties. In both cases the targets were Shia Muslims, celebrating Ashura, their holiest day.
The Taliban promptly and convincingly denied any part in these atrocities. At least on the surface, the predominantly Pashtun Taliban cannot wish to incite "distracting" clashes with the mostly Hazara and Tajik followers of the Shia way of Islam. That is the sort of thing they do after their return to power; not before. From the previously received Afghan terrorist point-ofview, it is essential to maintain a common front between those terrorists nurtured in frontier Pakistan, and those nurtured in revolutionary Iran, since unity is required to displace Hamid Karzai's regime.
But the game is made more subtle by the foreign sponsorships. For across the Middle East and Central Asia, the contest between Shia Iran, and the rising Sunni Islamists of the "Arab Spring," stokes conflict in a dimension previously invisible to western eyes. To us, Islamists have seemed all one force, and we grade them from "moderate" to "radical." But as election results in Tunisia and Egypt - and manoeuvring in Syria and Yemen - show, these are meaningless categories.
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/world+shifting+Islamic+alliances/5821952/story.html#ixzz1fsb1eO6s
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