A fierce sectarian conflict has erupted in a region of northwest Pakistan over land disputes between tribes. Members of two local tribal groups were seen retaliating with machine gun fire and mortar fire. At least 35 people have been killed in the country so far.
On Sunday (July 28), the French news agency AFP reported this information, quoting the country’s police officials.
According to it, the conflict between members of the Sunni Muslim Madagi and the pro-Shia Mali Khel tribal groups has been going on since last Wednesday in Pakistan’s Kurram district near the Afghan border.
Local police officer Murtaza Hussain said a gunman opened fire that day during a discussion of a decades-long dispute over farmland. No one was injured in the attack. The shooting rekindled long-standing religious tensions between the neighboring groups in the Kurram district on the border with Afghanistan.
Murtaza Hussain said that initially this incident was a dispute over land. Now it has turned into communal violence. He said that 35 people have lost their lives so far in this conflict.
The police official said the country’s government and local leaders are trying to end the conflict through jirgars (tribal councils). But their efforts have not been successful yet.
Inter-family feuds are quite common in Pakistan. Such incidents of violence are frequent in the country. The north-western mountainous region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been experiencing such violent incidents for a long time.
A senior government official in Kurram district, who declined to be named, also reported the loss of 35 lives in the ongoing conflict. However, he said that 151 more people were injured in this incident.
He said, the conflict is going on there for the fifth day. Today this conflict has turned into a Shia-Sunni conflict. All efforts to resolve the conflict have failed. Pakistan is a Sunni majority country in South Asia. Shia Muslims in the country are often subjected to discrimination and violence.
The government official said that the Shia tribe has suffered the most in the ongoing conflict. At least 30 of them were killed.
