Pakistan has been battling a
homegrown Islamist insurgency for more than a decade, with groups such as the
Pakistani Taliban routinely carrying out attacks as part of their struggle to
overthrow the government.
The conflict reached new heights in 2007 when various militant factions
came together under the umbrella Pakistani Taliban group, which was able to
entrench itself in the country’s border tribal areas and make territorial
gains.
A suicide bomber killed 18 people and injured 31 in a court complex in
the northwestern town of Shabqadar last week, in an attack which the Taliban
described as revenge for the hanging of an Islamist assassin.
The Pakistani Taliban’s Jamat-ul-Ahrar faction claimed responsibility
for the attack, saying it was to avenge the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri, who gunned
down the liberal governor of Punjab in 2011 over a call to reform the country’s
blasphemy law.
– Long war – Pakistan’s Islamist insurgency began after the US-led
invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001, which led to a spillover of
militants across the border and a surge in recruitment for Pakistani extremist
groups.
Talking to reporters at the site, Abbas Majid Marwat, another senior
police source, said the bus was transporting government employees from the
northwestern town of Mardan to Peshawar.
At least 16 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded when a
bomb blew up inside a bus in Peshawar, the main city of Pakistan’s
insurgency-wracked northwest, officials said, with the toll feared to rise.
“At least 16 people were killed and more than 24 were wounded in a blast
on a government employees’ bus,” senior police official Mohammad Kashif
Zulfiqar told the press.
Qadri, feted as a hero by Islamists, was
hanged on February 29 in what analysts described as a key moment in Pakistan’s
long fight against militancy, saying it demonstrated the government’s resolve
to uphold the rule of law rather than allow extremism to flourish
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