Thursday, November 1, 2012

Afghanistan's Nightmare Scenario


The Nightmare Scenarios -- Matthieu Aikins, New York Times

KABUL — Two separate killings this past weekend sent a new kind of chill down the spines of observers in Kabul. The first was a suicide blast in a mosque in Faryab Province, in the northwest, during the Muslim festival of Id al-Adha, which killed at least 45 people, many of them civilians. In the second attack — which got much less attention — five Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic minority, were reportedly pulled off a van and killed in Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan.

Although this country already sees a daily toll of civilian deaths from gunfights, I.E.D.’s and airstrikes, these killings were particularly worrisome because they suggest two types of nihilistic violence common in Iraq and Pakistan but that Afghanistan has yet to see: attacks designed to cause mass casualties among civilians and sectarian murders.

Read more ....

My Comment: Sectarian violence has always been the norm for much of the world's conflicts. Will this continue and escalate in Afghanistan .... considering how heavily armed all the factions are .... this could quickly evolve into the nightmare scenario that would make the current Syrian civil war look like 'small potatoes' in comparison.

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