Pakistan

Frenetic efforts to repair a 20 foot breach in the barrage guarding the major Sindhi city of Shahdadkot succeeded in keeping the city from being washed away. As it is, 90% of the urban area that once housed 300,000 has now been affected by the rushing flood waters. Relief officials say that the period through […]

As Pakistan’s massive flooding continues, Some 500,000 people have been forced to evacuate the Sindhi city of Jacobabad, suddenly finding themselves homeless. Ordinarily this sort of catastrophe would be news in itself, but with 4 million or so Pakistanis displaced, it is just one more piece of bad news. In one area of Sindh, 25,000 […]

I can barely believe the words I am writing are not a nightmare from which I will soon wake up. A third of Pakistan is now under water, and fresh rainfall threatens two more waves of flooding in the southern Sindh province. Courtesy BBC The submerged area of the country is as big as the […]

Two million more people have been affected by Pakistan’s floods– 13 million — than were affected by the 2005 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the Haiti earthquake combined. (The other disasters surpassed Pakistan’s floods in their over-all death rates). The entire city of Muzaffargarh in Pakistani Kashmir south Punjab is being evacuated and is […]

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck at a government office in the Mohmand region of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northwest Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 48 65 and wounding over 100. This is an area where the Pakistani military has fought the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (the Taliban Movement of Pakistan). […]

The FT says that at least two suicide bombers struck at the shrine of medieval Sufi master Datta Ganj Bakhsh (Sayyid Ali Hujwiri), the patron saint of Lahore, on Thursday evening, killing at least 42 and wounding 175. (The death toll will rise since many of the injured are in critical condition). Pakistan’s The News […]

The attack by ten armed and trained militants on two Ahmadi places of worship resembled in its techniques the assault on Mumbai (Bombay) in fall of 2008 (see this Federation of American Scientists report [.pdf]). Some at least of the militants appear to have been from southern Punjab and to have been residing in Waziristan […]