Yearbook 2016

Pakistan. In January, 22 people were killed in a terror attack against Bacha Khan University in the city of Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. The attack is said to have been ordered by Khalifa Umar Mansoor, leader of the Tariq Gidar Group, which is a branch of the Pakistani Taliban movement. In a video, Mansoor motivated the attack on the schools to educate future lawyers, officers and parliamentarians who “challenge Allah’s sovereignty”.

In the northern Waziristan clan areas, in February, the last phase of a military offensive against militant rebels and Taliban began in the summer of 2014. According to Pakistan Army Chief Raheel Sharif, the last terrorists would be cleared from their hiding places deep in the forest. During the attack, 34 Islamist insurgents and five soldiers died.

In the same month, Mumtaz Qadri was hanged for murdering 2011 Governor of Punjab Province Salman Taseer. Qadri worked as the Governor’s bodyguard when he shot him to death in a market in the capital Islamabad. After the murder, Qadri was hailed as a hero by radical Islamists, who believed that Taseer deserved to die because he was opposed to the country’s harsh laws against blasphemy, including the death penalty for blaspheming Islam.

Pakistan Population 2016

According to countryaah, the current population of Pakistan is 220,892,351. A short week later, at least ten people were killed in a suicide attack outside a court in Charsadda. Pakistani Taliban belonging to the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar group took up the deed and stated that the attack was a revenge for the execution of Mumtaz Qadri.

In March, over 70 people died and hundreds were injured in a suicide attack against Christian Easter celebrants who had gathered in a park in the city of Lahore in Punjab province in eastern Pakistan. Of the dead, 29 were reported to be children. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar took up the deed and said the target was Christian, but also a message to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that the Taliban had entered the largest city in the Punjab region which had been relatively spared from terrorist acts.

At the same time, thousands of Pakistanis in the capital Islamabad demonstrated against the execution of Mumtaz Qadri. According to analysts, the protests in Islamabad were coordinated with the attack in Lahore and a “two-front attack on the government”. Following the terrorist attack in Lahore, the authorities arrested more than 5,000 people, of whom all but 216 suspects were later released.

During the spring months, Pakistan was subject to heavy rainfall. Worst affected were the provinces of Baluchistan in the southwest, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the northwest and parts of Kashmir in the northeast. A total of nearly 100 people died as a result of floods and landslides caused by the heavy rainfall.

  • Abbreviation Finder: Check to see how the 3-letter abbreviation of PAK stands for the nation of Pakistan in geography.

During the summer, honor-related violent crimes became the subject of debate and became media attention even in Sweden, not least after the 25-year-old internet celebrity Qandeel Baloch, according to some Pakistan’s response to Kim Kardashian, was murdered by his cousin and brother because of his statements in social media. Another described case was a 16-year-old girl who was burned to death by her mother after she escaped to marry a man she had chosen.

An influential Sunni Muslim group of legal scholars, the Sunni Ittehad Council, after many noteworthy murders of women, issued a fatwa against honor killings. “Burning women alive because they married someone they themselves chose is against the teachings of Islam,” the council said, urging the government to change the laws that “forgive” family members to kill in honor. According to the Reuters news agency, over 500 women die in honor-related crimes in Pakistan each year. Most of the perpetrators are never prosecuted.

According to thereligionfaqs, Pakistan’s military and sources within the Pakistani Taliban movement said in July that Taliban leader Khalifa Umar Mansoor, also known as Umar Narai, was killed in a US drone attack in Afghanistan. Mansoor has been accused of being behind the school attack in Peshawar in 2014, when 150 people died, most of whom were children.

A suicide bomber triggered an explosive charge in August in a hospital in the city of Quetta in Baluchistan. The attack was directed at relatives and colleagues of the chairman of the law firm Bilal Anwar Kasi, who had gathered at the hospital’s emergency department to mourn Kasi, who was shot dead by unknown perpetrators just hours earlier. In the explosion, more than 70 people were killed and more than a hundred were injured. Both Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and the terrorist group Islamic State (IS) took on the deed. After the massacre, large parts of the country’s lawyers boycotted a whole day’s court proceedings in protest.

Another bloody terrorist attack hit Quetta in October when 63 people were killed and more than 119 injured in a shootout against a police college. A spokesperson for the militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi told the Reuters news agency that, in collaboration with IS, they were behind the deed. On the same month, Parliament passed a law which meant that honor killers should be punished with life imprisonment and not be pardoned by the victim’s family.

In the autumn, tensions between the two nuclear powers India and Pakistan increased with several violent clashes in Kashmir. Ever since British India was divided into two independent states in 1947, fighting over Kashmir has been going on between the countries.