News From Our Two Fronts

Lahore, 30 March (AKI) – By Syed Saleem Shahzad – Home-grown Al-Qaeda led militants are behind Monday’s deadly attack on a police training academy in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, according to interior ministry chief Rahman Malik and some security analysts, including former general Talat Massood.

Such attacks have in the past been blamed on foreign intelligence agencies. While militant violence has surged in Pakistan since mid-2007, most violence has been in the northwest near the Afghan border.

Militant sources confirmed the early-morning grenade and rifle assault on the police academy was retaliation by Al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud and Punjabi militants for Pakistan’s recent cooperation with the United States in hunting down Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

The attack marks a new front in the war against Pakistan’s security forces, the sources said.

Between 18 and 20 gunmen reportedly killed up to 50 people, wounded up to 90 and took hundreds of police cadets hostage during an eight-hour siege of the academy.

Deadly blast hits Pakistan mosque

BAGHDAD (NYT) — The shooting died down in a Sunni enclave of the capital where neighborhood guards had faced off with Iraqi and American soldiers over the previous 24 hours; the guards were disarmed and stripped of their badges, but tensions remained high.

The leader of the Awakening Council in the Fadhil neighborhood, Adil al-Mashhadani, was arrested Saturday by American-backed Iraqi soldiers. Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, the spokesman for the security forces in Baghdad, accused him on Sunday of leading an armed military wing of the Baath Party, which is a violation of the Constitution.

The American military said Sunday that he was suspected of illegally searching and detaining Fadhil residents, extorting bribes of more than $160,000 a month from them and leading cells that organized attacks using homemade bombs and mortars. He also is suspected of colluding with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and with another insurgent network, Jaish al-Islami.  

KIRKUK, Iraq – Seeking to head off an explosion of ethnic violence, the United Nations will call for a power-sharing system of government for Iraq’s deeply divided region of Kirkuk in the oil-rich north.

A draft U.N. plan, outlined to The Associated Press by two Western officials, aims to defuse dangerous tensions. Kurds, a majority in the region, have been trying to wrest control from Arabs, Turkomen and other rival ethnic groups. If open warfare breaks out, it could jeopardize the U.S. goal of stability across Iraq before elections at year’s end.

Peaceful elections are critical to reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq, promised by President Barack Obama.

Ethnic tensions in Kirkuk turn U.S. military into mediator