Neighbors With Guns

By Iftikhar Firdous –

Militants entrench themselves in the outskirts of Peshawar

Some cities are cursed be geography and Peshawar has historically been in the eye of the storm but the current siege of the city is of a very different kind. A spate of terror attacks can be traced back to the buffer zones between the tribal and the settled areas.

In this year alone, from the 1st of January to 1st of July 2013, around 106 incidents of terror have been reported in Peshawar. A majority, some 60, of the incidents of terror have taken place on the outskirts of the city. Official statistics reveal that around two dozen of these incidents are physical attacks in which either civilians, police, security or government officials have been killed by armed militants.

Since the military operation in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) began, particularly in Khyber and Orakzai tribal areas, security officials and politicians alike have expressed the need for a full cleanup operation in the outskirts of Peshawar because of constant fear that gripped the locals when militants of various factions established their own form of parallel government in the area.

While targeted operations in the Frontier Region (FR) Peshawar continued along with the help of the local peace councils, locally known as the Aman Lashkars,  differences between the lashkar and government also emerged when residents of the areas of Mattani and Adezai objected to the methods employed by the private militias.

Residents of the area have consistently complained of extra-judicial methods employed by private militias and termed their fight with the militants as settling their personal feuds, denouncing their rivals as militant targets. Such differences took a serious turn in May of 2012 when the Lashkar decided to quit its war terming the government’s aid insufficient. The government did try to resolve the issue for the time being in January of 2013 the private guards of these lashkars were withdrawn as the police termed these private peace keepers as “insufficient”.

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