Word: peshawar
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Even though the military, eager for progress before Pakistan's Feb. 18 general election, has reported success against Islamists in the nearby Swat Valley, the militants' campaign against entertainment in Peshawar has only escalated. During the 1990s, when Taliban rule in Afghanistan forced scores of refugee artists into Pakistan, Peshawar became the capital of pop culture for the Pashtun, an ethnic-minority group numbering some 39 million along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Local producers built a formidable movie industry that served up a formulaic diet of violence and sexism (but no sex) to Pashtun populations on both sides...
...actually gotten worse: sectarian strife on the Afghan border has claimed more than 100 lives, and at least four police and eight frontier-corps soldiers have been beheaded in Swat. "Musharraf's emergency was just a pretext," says Shah Jehan, director of the Institute of Management Studies at Peshawar University. "If he really wanted to do something [about terrorism] he would have pulled the plug on the FM Mullah. Instead, things are getting worse...
...meantime, while Bhutto was addressing the crowd, a suicide bomber in the northern city of Peshawar, bordering Pakistan's restive tribal areas, detonated himself at the residence of a government minister, killing four. When Musharraf declared emergency rule last week, he cited the threat of religious extremists. Of course, suicide bombers are easier to prevent in hindsight, but it cannot be overlooked that while government security forces focused all their attention today on one woman calling for democracy, terrorists scored one more victory for their cause...
...wasn't just party leaders who were detained. Khurshid Ahmed Khan, a flour mill owner dressed in a simple shalwar kameeze, had started out from Peshawar on Sunday with a party of some 800 supporters. By the time they reached the airport, the party was down to one. All the others had been stopped at barricades blocking the roads into the capital. The only reason he was able to get to the airport, he says, was that he had had the foresight to buy an outgoing air ticket that day and was, thus, technically a passenger. He called himself...
...police because they are sure the security forces are involved and have a hand in the kidnapping. They are worried that if they report something they will have more problems in the future." The son of a friend, he says, was kidnapped and taken across the border to Peshawar, where he was held for a $30,000 ransom. It was eventually negotiated down to $16,000, which was all that the man could scrape together...