Woe is your life if you are a member of a religious minority in Pakistan. If that is the case then your life is little more than a living hell of oppression and violence directed towards you and your family.

I’ve spoken often in this strand about how life for Christians, Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan is a life of hellish fear. But it should not be forgotten that to be a member of an Islamic religious minority such as a Shia or an Ismaili or an Ahmediyya is also to suffer from the Sunni supremacism that dominates Pakistan.

There’s an excellent piece that I advise people to read that was originally published in The Diplomat magazine, a publication that covers politics in the Asia Pacific region, which I was alerted to by the Religion of Peace website. In this piece the author Kunwar Khuldune Shahid gives a potted history of the plight of the Hazara Shias in the Balochistan region of Pakistan. This group has been consistently targeted for violence by Sunni jihadists and the Balochistan region has been the site of proxy wars engaged in by Saudi and Iranian interests.

The Diplomat article spells out much that many of us suspected, which is that the Pakistani government sees the various jihadist groups that operate in Pakistan and in Balochistan in particular as ‘military assets’.

The Diplomat said:

The Af-Pak border became the multipronged corridor for Afghan jihad in the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to, among other jihadist groups, anti-Shia outfits like the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). These groups enjoyed Pakistan’s patronage, as the state also allowed itself to become a battleground for the Saudi-Iran proxy wars. That sectarian warfare fast metamorphosed into anti-Shia pogroms being carried out by jihadist groups proudly owned by the military and intelligence as “strategic assets,” an array of non-state actors designed to cause disruption and destruction in the region in line with a Sunni Islamist narrative.

What is happening to the Hazara Shias is indeed a pogrom with 2000 Shias being killed by jihadist groups since 2004 alone. This is also a pogrom for which a large degree of blame needs to be laid at the feet of various Pakistani governments for it is these governments that have engaged in a policy of appeasing anti-Shia Sunni militants and having the Pakistani military endorse and sometimes be sympathetic to, the jihadists who target the Shia.

The horrific stories of how the Shia are treated somewhat worse than dirt by Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim masters as told by the Diplomat magazine show that hatred and oppression of minorities is not just aimed at the Christians, despite this issue getting a lot of publicity. Violence and oppression is also aimed by the Pakistani government at anyone who is perceived as being the ‘wrong’ sort of Muslim.