An entire generation of a city’s lawyers was killed in Pakistan
Baluchistan is a place that desperately needs lawyers.
Pakistan's largest province by area, it is the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency, fueled by real grievances over neglect and lack of political representation. It is also increasingly the target of Sunni extremists, who bomb and kill its Shiite minorities. What leaders the province has are widely considered corrupt. Dozens of local journalists have been kidnapped in the past few years. It is nearly impossible for foreign reporters to enter Baluchistan. Lawyers are almost all that give the province a semblance of justice.
About 60 of them were killed in one attack on Monday in Baluchistan's capital, Quetta. They were packed into an emergency room where the body of a slain colleague lay, riddled with gunshot wounds. A widely circulated video showed lawyers milling about the hospital before an enormous explosion. A Pakistani Taliban offshoot claimed the attack, as did the Islamic State, though analysts say the latter's claim is dubious.
[Scores of attorneys among the dead in suicide bombing in southwestern Pakistan]
A week earlier, another lawyer was fatally shot. In June, the principal of the province's law college was, too.
A generation of lawyers has been wiped out in Quetta, and it will leave Baluchistan, in more ways than one, lawless.
Photo of lawyers killed in #QuettaAttack shared widely on Twitter.Many mourning a'generation of lawyers' #QuettaBlast pic.twitter.com/1rXPd42659
- shaimaa khalil BBC (@Shaimaakhalil) August 9, 2016
On Tuesday, the Pakistani bar association called for an indefinite boycott of the courts. But so few lawyers are left in Baluchistan that it will be years, probably, until its legal community recovers.
The global response has been muted. Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton and other international figures issued brief statements. Pakistan's leaders did much the same. No officials have been held responsible for the security breakdown at what should have been a highly guarded scene. The website of Dawn, a Pakistani English-language newspaper, had only a day-old story and photo gallery about the attack on its homepage on Tuesday evening.
Barkhurdar Khan, a member of the Baluchistan Bar Council, was one of the few lawyers who survived the attack. He has practiced in Quetta for nine months. After the attack, Khan offered his singular perspective in a heartrending stream of posts on social media.
"All, I repeat ALL senior practicing lawyers and barristers died today," he wrote. "The number of junior lawyers, who are the sole breadwinners of their homes and who are now unemployed runs into hundreds."
"Most of those who died were first-gen educated. The scenes of misery and loss cannot be put into words. The bent shoulders of their fathers, the broken backs of their brothers. Their kids, still oblivious to their own loss, playing and hoping," Khan continued. "Every lawyer that has ever given me a lift home is dead, except for one, Naveed Qambrani, he is critical and was airlifted to Karachi."
"Heartwrenching is an understatement."
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Quetta attack: ISIL and Taliban claim suicide bombing
A Pakistani Taliban faction and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have both claimed responsibility for a suicide attack at a hospital in Pakistan's Quetta that killed at least 70 people.
Monday's attack targeted a group of mourning lawyers, who had gathered at the emergency department of the hospital to accompany the body of a murdered colleague.
"The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaat-ur-Ahrar takes responsibility for this attack, and pledges to continue carrying out such attacks. We will release a video report on this soon," the group's spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said in an email.
ISIL, which is also known as ISIS, also claimed responsibility for the attack.
"A martyr from the Islamic State [of Iraq and the Levant] detonated his explosive belt at a gathering of justice ministry employees and Pakistani policemen in the city of Quetta," the armed group's Amaq website said.
The blast happened at the gate of the emergency room in the morning.
The lawyers were at the unit because earlier in the day armed men, who are still unidentified, had shot Bilal Anwar Kasi, reports said.
Kasi, who later died from his injuries, was the former president of the Balochistan Bar Association. He had been on his way to work when he was attacked.
Many of the dead appeared to be lawyers, wearing black suits and ties.
Balochistan Home Minister Sarfraz Bugti said: "The blast occurred after a number of lawyers and some journalists had gathered at the hospital following the death of Bilal Anwar Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, in a separate shooting incident early this morning."
Several people were wounded as they rushed to leave the hospital.
Pakistani media said that journalists were among the victims, with at least two cameramen killed. One cameraman was named by local media as Aaj TV's Shehzad Khan.
The other was Mehmood Khan of Dawn News, who had in the past worked for Al Jazeera. His colleague Sumaira Jajja wrote on Twitter that Khan, a father of seven children, started out as a security guard before joining Dawn as an officer worker to then become a cameraman. He had planned to do a master's degree in journalism.
Balochistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, has oil and gas resources and is afflicted by fighting, violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and a separatist rebellion.
"The attack took place at the main gate to the emergency area," said Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad.
"Importantly, this happened after the president of the Quetta bar was gunned down," he said. "There are big questions after this security lapse. There is a very heavy death toll and most killed today are people belonging to the legal fraternity."
Hyder said an attack took place at the same hospital in 2010.
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OP Note: There are photos and videos at the sources, but they're too upsetting and graphic to post here. God, I can't imagine what they're going through right now. RIP to all those innocent lives lost..