The deafening roar of rocket launchers and mortar explosions shattered the tranquility of Pakistan’s Kurram district, home to majestic mountains, ancient maple forests and fertile fields on the border with Afghanistan. As the village turned into a battlefield, people crowded into makeshift bunkers and exchanged desperate shots.
Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the region have been fighting on and off for months over land disputes, paralleling two wars in Afghanistan and the rise of terrorist groups in the region. This is the latest flare-up of a conflict that has been simmering for decades.
At least 16 people were killed in the October 12 clashes, including an ambush on a convoy under militia protection. Since then, residents said warring tribes have blocked roads and food and medicine are in short supply. In September, fighting broke out between members of the two communities, leaving 46 people dead. Nearly 50 people lost their lives in the week-long fighting in July.
“This is not a conflict between tribes, it’s like a war between two countries,” said Hussain Ali, 26, a university student from Parachinar, Kurram’s main city. “Innocent people are suffering and the government is indifferent.”
The violence shows the limited reach of Pakistan’s government along the border, which appears benign but is flammable beneath the surface. Some Shiite villages are very close to Sunni villages, and tensions are high.
Pakistan has a Sunni majority, but Shiites make up about 45% of the 800,000 people in Kurram, and Shiites dominate Parachinar.
Ali, a university student, is from the Turi tribe, the only fully Shiite Pashtun tribe in Pakistan, the second largest ethnic group. The vast majority of Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan are Sunnis.
Shiites and Sunnis have often clashed over the use of Quram’s agricultural land and forests. Much of the land in some border districts is communally owned, but no formal records exist. But local elders say Kurram’s land ownership was only partially documented during British colonial times, and the indeterminacy of those records helped fuel the long-running conflict.
Pakistan’s government has been unable to stop the clashes, but police say they have arrested dozens of people in connection with the latest violence. Previous governments also failed to stop fighting in the region.
Last year, at least 25 people were killed in clashes over land in Kurram. In another horrific incident, seven Shiite teachers were murdered at their school.
“It is shameful that the regime failed to prevent a simple land dispute from escalating into sectarian violence,” said Hameed Hussain, a member of parliament from Kurram who organized the peaceful protest in Parachinar.
“When conflicts arise, troublemakers spread propaganda through mosque announcements to incite violence along sectarian lines,” he said.
The threat of violence is so deeply ingrained that self-defense has become a way of life. Many people in Kurram learn to use heavy weapons from an early age.
“I hate violence, but in areas where the government has little control, it is mandatory for us to take up arms to defend ourselves and our land,” said a man from a Sunni-majority village. said farmer Sharafat Chamkani, 34. amidst numerous conflicts.
Khurram, also known as the parrot’s beak because it extends into Afghanistan, borders Afghanistan’s Ghost, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces. Parachinar is just 100 miles from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
The Shiites and Sunnis of Quram lived in near harmony for centuries, despite occasional violence. However, the situation changed dramatically in 1979 with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s Shiite revolution.
“These events have eroded traditional cultural values, torn apart once-unified tribes along sectarian and socio-economic lines, and heightened tensions in Kurram,” said Professor of Political Science at the University of Peshawar. Noreen Nasir said.
The demographic and sectarian balance of Khurram changed significantly in the 1980s with the influx of Sunni Afghan refugees and the establishment of Mujahideen groups backed by Pakistan and the United States to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
“It was a time when the Afghan Mujahideen were introducing their brand of Sunni Islam extremism and the Shia population was also being radicalized by the Iranian revolution,” said Dr. Noreen, who is originally from Quram.
This led to heightened tensions and two major violent incidents in the 1980s that left dozens of people, mostly Shiites, dead. Shiites were forced to flee the Sunni-majority town of Sadda to Parachinar.
With the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, they provided arms and personnel to their Sunni allies in Quram, inciting more clashes that left hundreds dead.
The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ushered in new dynamics. While Pakistani Sunnis in areas near Quram were harboring fugitive Taliban and Qaeda militants, Shiites in Quram did not, inviting the hostility of these groups.
In 2005, Pakistan expelled Afghan refugees from Kurram, sparking fears among Sunnis that Shiite rule would return. That led to bloody clashes starting in April 2007 and the expulsion of Sunnis from Parachinar.
Sectarian violence worsened in early 2008 with the arrival of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an extremist umbrella group formed in nearby tribal areas. After a 45-day firefight, Crum was completely destroyed. Hundreds of Shia and Sunnis, as well as Pakistani Taliban militants, were killed and several villages burned.
Shiite leaders claimed that the TTP wanted to take control of Parachinar so that the Shiites would not use the territory to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “In fact, the TTP’s atrocities have allowed Shia tribesmen to unite and mount an organized resistance,” said Niyaz Muhammad Karbalai, an elder in the Parachinar region.
After about 2,000 people were killed, a 2011 peace agreement finally ended nearly four years of relentless war. However, sporadic violence continued.
In early 2015, a group of disgruntled TTP members from Kurram and neighboring regions established Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), an affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist group. After five suicide bombings occurred in the city of Parachinar in 2017, residents demanded the establishment of military checkpoints to prevent outsiders from entering the city.
The conflict in Quram has intensified with the return of young Shiite residents who fought in Syria’s civil war to support Bashar al-Assad’s government and protect Shiite shrines from Islamic State bombing.
Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Kurram’s tribe has acquired state-of-the-art American weapons left behind by Afghan forces, contributing to the violence.
The decades-long conflict is deeply etched in the collective memory of the people of Kurram.
“Violence, especially the wave that started in 2007, turned local land disputes into full-blown sectarian clashes and widened the divide between Shiites and Sunnis,” said Chamkani, a farmer. “I am skeptical that people from the two sects of Kurram will be able to coexist peacefully anytime soon.”
