Bombing kills 8 in Shia neighborhood in Pakistan

A roadside bomb blast in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt has killed at least eight people, including three women and a child, in a yet another terror attack targeting minority Shia Muslims in the country.

A senior local government official, Basir Khan Wazir, said an improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated on Tuesday in the mostly Shia-populated Maqbal area of the Kurram tribal district near the Afghan border as a van carrying nine passengers was driving by.

The official said that among the passengers killed in the bombing were three women and a seven-year-old boy.

He said authorities were attempting to identify the mutilated bodies of the victims but primary evidence suggested that all of the passengers had been Shia Muslims.

Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the terrorist bombing, Taliban- and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists have in the past frequently targeted Shias, who make up more than 20 percent of Pakistan’s population.

Those terrorist groups adhere to Saudi Arabia’s state religion of Wahhabism, a radical and deviant pseudo-ideology that seeks to project itself as a sect of Islam. Saudi Arabia is also widely believed to be supporting and financing terrorist groups such as Daesh, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban in the region.

Meanwhile, the Upper Kurram district has been the scene of a number of terror bombings targeting Shia Muslims in the past, often leading to massacres. Kurram is also among the seven semi-autonomous — and the most impoverished and neglected — regions in Pakistan that form the tribal belt along the Afghan border.

Pakistani Shias have often complained that the country’s police and military authorities have persistently failed to provide them with adequate security despite frequent terror attacks specifically targeting them in recent years.