Taliban splinter group claims attack on Christians at Pakistan park; 60 dead

By Shaiq Hussain,Erin Cunningham

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide blast claimed by Islamist militants ripped through crowds of families celebrating Easter at a park in the city of Lahore on Sunday, killing at least 60 people and injuring another 300 in an attack the jihadists said had deliberately targeted Christians.

The attack was carried out by a suicide bomber in the parking lot of Gulshan e-Iqbal Park at about 6:30 in the evening, transforming a joyful scene of picnicking families into a spectacle of chaos and horror. Many children were among the dead, local officials said.

A spokesman for the Jamaat ul-Ahrar militant group -- an offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban -- asserted responsibility in a telephone interview on Sunday.

“It was our people who attacked the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter,” the spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said. “It’s our message to the government that we will carry out such attacks again until sharia [Islamic law] is imposed in the country.”

Pakistan, a country of 190 million, has suffered for years from sectarian violence and Islamist militancy, including a Taliban-led insurgency in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. Christians make up about 1 percent of Pakistan’s population, but have maintained a larger presence in Lahore.

In Lahore, Parveen Masih, a 30-year-old Christian woman, said she had gone to the park with her husband and kids to celebrate Easter. They were there when the bomb exploded.

“This attack was about nothing other than to sabotage our happiness,” Masih, who was wounded in the face, said in a telephone interview. “We had only a few days to celebrate, and they didn’t even let us enjoy those.”

The government of Punjab province – where the attack occurred, and which is Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s political stronghold – announced three days of mourning. A statement from the office of Punjab’s chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, who is the prime minister’s brother, pledged that the culprits would be brought to trial.

“Those who targeted innocent citizens do not deserve to be called humans,” Shahbaz Sharif posted on his Twitter account. “We will hunt you down,” he said. And “make sure your terror infrastructure is dismantled completely.”

Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, met with his security advisers following the attack, , and they reached “key decisions” on how to respond, a statement from his office said.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, the Jamaat ul-Ahrar spokesman, declared that the militants would strike again in Punjab. The group broke away from the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehreek-e-Taliban, in 2014, as a result of infighting between top commanders. Jamaat ul-Ahrar rejoined the Taliban in March 2015, but still maintains its own faction within the group.

The top security official in the province, Haider Ashraf, said an initial forensic investigation into the attackconcluded that the suicide bomber had packed more than 20 pounds of explosives in his vest. Ball bearings, typically used in bomb attacks to maximize casualties, were found at the scene, Ashraf said.

On Sunday, March 27, a bomb exploded in a crowded market in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore claiming the lives of at least 60 people. (AP)

“We can say it was suicide blast, in which most of the Christian families and Muslim families who went to Gulshan-e-Iqbal park to enjoy the holiday were targeted,” he said, adding that the attacker detonated his explosives near an area marked off for women.

Witnesses to the carnage described body parts scattered in the wake of the attack, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported. Images on social media showed panic and chaos in the moments after the blast, and medics ferrying the wounded away on stretchers.

In one case, four members of a single family were killed, a medic said. The only survivor was a 10-year-old boy, who was also injured.

“I was about to enter the park with my kids” when the explosion happened, said Anwar Ali, aresident of Lahore. “My kids started crying and I held them tightly when I saw the wounded.”

In a statement on Sunday, the State Department said that the United States “stands with the people and government of Pakistan at this difficult hour.”

“Attacks like these only deepen our shared resolve to defeat terrorism around the world,” the statement said.

The government of Punjab announced on its Twitter account that it was offering free rides to those who wished to donate blood to the victims.

In Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, the army was deployed on Sunday to the “Red Zone” area of the city to help quell unrest following a violent protest march by Muslims. Thousands of demonstrators turned out to denounce the execution last month of Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated the former Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, in 2011. Taseer had spoken out against Pakistan’s blasphemy law.

Police could not halt the demonstrators, who rampaged across central Islamabad, setting buildings on fire on Sunday. The Red Zone area of the capital houses a number of vital government institutions, including parliament and the prime minister’s house.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/explosion-kills-at-least-15-at-park-in-pakistans-lahore-reports-say/2016/03/27/00e49d32-f42e-11e5-958d-d038dac6e718_story.html/
*Pics, Etc. On Link *

yep,the Religion of Peace on another Friendship-Mission!

Man, that blasphemin will get you every time

Guys let's be fair. ISIS is zelots. Let blame them. Not all Muslims. I mean we do want them to fight their own fights right?

now,we only need to mark them somehow,to distinguish the Good ones from the Bad ones!
Indelible Ink,maybe?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/22/radicalization-isil-islam-sacred-texts-literal-interpretation-column/81808560/#

Western recruits for jihad are inspired by the literal interpretation of Muslim sacred texts. This is what we must fight.

Americans awoke this morning to another terrorist attack — this time in the Brussels airport and subway. These attacks hit close to home. Many of us have flown through the Brussels airport, just as we have vacationed in Paris and visited San Bernardino. Once again images of the injured flood social media channels, reminding Americans of the ever-present reality that it could have been us. How is this happening? Why are people becoming radicalized, and so close to home? I am concerned how little we in the West understand why peaceful Muslims who live among us are drawn into radical Islam.

As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words. My father served in the U.S. Navy throughout my childhood, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander. I believed wholeheartedly a slogan often repeated at my mosque after 9/11: “The terrorists who hijacked the planes also hijacked Islam.”

Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence. How could I reconcile this with what I had always been taught about Islam?

In February 2015, the U.S. State Department Acting Spokesperson Marie Harf suggested that a “lack of opportunity for jobs” might be a significant factor in radicalization and terrorism. Alternatively, Suraj Lakhani, a scholar of radicalization in Wales, suggested that the process is driven by religious concerns and a drive to bolster one’s personal identity. He implies that young Muslims ought not be allowed to hear ISIL messages or interact with their recruiters.

Naturally, I agree that interacting with ISIL recruiters is a bad idea, but I believe what the recruiters themselves say sheds the most insight on the radicalization process. ISIL’s primary recruiting technique is not social or financial but theological. With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established.

A recent two-page spread in the third issue of ISIL’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, for instance, appealed to prospective recruits to leave their homeland and emigrate to the Islamic State by quoting a hadith from the canonical collections; it urged them to realize that they are living in times that reflect those of the earliest Muslims by referring to Muhammad’s life; it encouraged them to take a step of faith by quoting the Quran; and it praised them for their obedience by quoting yet another hadith. All four references to the Quran, hadith and the related Sunnah, were on the same two-page spread. Such is the frequency and intensity with which ISIL uses Islam's foundational texts to appeal to potential recruits.

As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam. That is no longer the case today. Just as radical Islamists may spread their message far and wide online, so, too, the Internet has made the traditions of Muhammad readily available for whoever wishes to look them up, even in English. When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.

The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad's message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.


Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may “prevail over all religions” (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).

Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, “We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. ... Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.” In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.

This is not at all to say that most Muslims are violent. The vast majority of Muslims do not live their lives based on chapter 9 of the Quran or on the books of jihad in the hadith. My point is not to question the faith of such Muslims nor to imply that radical Muslims are the true Muslims. Rather, I simply want to make clear that while ISIL may lure youth through a variety of methods, it radicalizes them primarily by urging them to follow the literal teachings of the Quran and the hadith, interpreted consistently and in light of the violent trajectory of early Islam. As long as the Islamic world focuses on its foundational texts, we will continue to see violent jihadi movements.

In order to effectively confront radicalization, then, our tools must be similarly ideological, even theological. This is why I suggest that sharing alternative worldviews with Muslims is one of the best methods to address radicalization. Indeed, this is what happened to me. As I faced the reality of the violent traditions of Islam, I had a Christian friend who suggested that Islam did not have to be my only choice and that there were excellent reasons to accept the gospel.

As more and more Western Muslims encounter ISIL’s claims and the surprising violence in their own tradition, many will be looking for ways out of the moral quandary this poses for them. We need to be equipped to provide alternatives to violent jihad, alternatives that address the root of why so many Muslims are radicalizing in the first place. Any solution, political or otherwise, that overlooks the spiritual and religious roots of jihad can have only limited effectiveness.

Dr. Nabeel Qureshi is a speaker with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and is the author of Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward. Follow him on Twitter at @NAQureshi

I think Muslim leaders have been failing worldwide. They need to report these bad Muslims. Time for them to get off the bench. Or it will be like the internment camps of ww2.

the article didn't specify the nationalities or religion of those killed,, it did say Christians and muslims were celebrating

why does the thread state that it was 60 Christians killed?

although they targeted Christians, seems killing is pretty much along ideological lines of anyone not in line with them, including muslims..who they kill far more of than anyone else

It must be dark in that closet of yours

I will take that as another deflection to avoid an answer

I will take that as another deflection to avoid an answer

Your question does not warrant one & neither do you.

not that it doesn't warrant one,, it just means you don't have one

so I researched the topic and answered the question myself,,,for those interested



"

Some 300 people were injured when explosives packed with ball bearings ripped through crowds near the children's swings in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, in Lahore, where many had gathered to celebrate Easter.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack, adding: 'The target was Christians.'

Senior police official Haider Ashraf confirmed that the death toll had risen to 72 on Monday morning, adding the majority of the dead were Muslims


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3511528/Dozens-mothers-children-52-killed-suicide-bomber-targeted-Christians-celebrating-Easter-park-Pakistan.html#ixzz44IHPqFVE
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook




its senseless killing to invoke fear and take power, and more muslims are dying at the hands of extremists than anyone else,,,,which is why its such nonsense when people imply that muslims all want to kill christians

well last time I checked,Christians celebrate Easter,not Muslims!

yet,,the majority at the park were muslims