It was a week before Eid, and the streets of Mari Abad were lit up. Even though it was midnight, women and children were out shopping for clothes, haggling with shopkeepers for earrings or firmly telling the tailor to have their clothes ready two days before Eid. Standing there, it was hard to tell that the people who live there are not entirely free.
Mari Abad is a small neighbourhood of Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province in Pakistan. Over the past two decades, this neighbourhood of around five thousand houses has come to be known as a Hazara area. The city’s military cantonment lies on one side of Mari Abad, with Quetta’s signature dark, barren mountains on the other. Rangers from Pakistan’s frontier corps check every car that enters Mari Abad, and examine the identification documents of those who are not Hazara.
The Hazara can be distinguished from other ethnicities present in Quetta by the epicanthal folds on their eyes and the language they speak. They are said to have migrated from Afghanistan to parts of Pakistan and Iran in the late nineteenth century, fleeing persecution by the Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan. They resemble Mongols, but their language and culture borrow heavily from those of the Persians. They speak Hazaragi, a dialect of Persian. The Hazara believe they are the descendants of the army of Genghis Khan, although there is little research to substantiate this claim.
For the Hazara living in Mari Abad, Eid celebrations evoke nostalgia for a time when they could shop in the larger markets of the city, when they did not have to pay three times the retail price for products. This was a time when being a Hazara in Quetta did not carry any significance—it was little different to being a Pathan, a Brahui, a Punjabi or a member of any other ethnicity.
Since 1999, though, a spate of attacks by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni supremacist terrorist organisation, has left the Hazara isolated, and frustrated by the lack of action by the Pakistan government to protect them. The LeJ was formed in 1996 with an agenda of ridding Pakistan of all Shias, whom it believes to be infidels. Part of this agenda has been a wave of targeted killings of individuals belonging to the Hazara community. According to Pakistan’s national commission for human rights, 509 Hazara have been killed, and 627 injured, in the country between 2012 and 2017. The unofficial figures provided by the Hazara themselves are higher.
The Hazara community in Quetta has seen many of its members leave the city—and often the country—to pursue safety and better opportunities, as the increasing violence makes it impossible for them to continue living in the city. Venturing outside Mari Abad for something as simple as meeting one’s friends can prompt an attack. As a result, most young people go to school within the neighbourhood and usually move away for college.
For most people in their twenties who grew up in Mari Abad, violence and the fear of death has long accompanied them. Syed Sajjad Hussain was in college when the attacks began. When we met at his friend’s home in September, he was sitting on the floor in a simple beige salwar kameez, resting his back on a cushion.
Hussain recalled the time he first realised that the Hazara were being targeted. He said it was an attack on 2 March 2004 during an Ashura procession, a Shia tradition of mourning the death of Husayn ibn Ali at the Battle of Karbala. As the procession entered Quetta’s central marketplace, three LeJ militants threw hand grenades and opened fire, killing 42 people and injuring over a hundred. Before 2004, Hussain said, other communities would join in the procession every year, often setting up water stalls for the mourners, but after the attack they began staying away.
The Ashura procession is now limited to the confines of Mari Abad, since there is not enough security to take it anywhere else. It is not only the Ashura procession that has been affected by the violence—all sorts of activities have been curtailed. The Hazara were initially advised not to visit certain parts of Quetta. Now, if they travel outside Hazara areas such as Mari Abad, they are understood to be doing so at their own risk. Many of them do work elsewhere in the city, but under constant fear of attack. Most Hazara men have migrated abroad, seeking asylum. Other communities began leaving Mari Abad soon after the attacks began.
Hussain returned to the city in 2008, having completed a bachelor’s degree at the National College of Arts in Lahore. He began teaching at the Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, or BUITEMS. He found his city in a different state, noticing the lack of diversity in Mari Abad following the exodus of other communities. His friends from school no longer wanted to come to his neighbourhood because they did not feel safe—crossing the military check posts and spending time in Mari Abad began to seem like daunting tasks. Hussain did not want to step outside the neighbourhood to meet them. There was a mistrust between the communities that had not existed before.
His posture did not change as he recalled the first attack he experienced himself. It was in 2010, on the occasion of Youm-ul-Quds, a day celebrated throughout Pakistan to express solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. In Quetta, the commemoration is largely associated with the Hazara and their Shia roots in Iran. The LeJ took responsibility for an attack on a procession—organised by the Imamia Student Organisation, a Shia group—which killed 73 people and injured over two hundred. “I fell down and passed out when the firing started,” Hussain told me. “When I came back to my senses, I was lying in a veranda, on the ground.” His shoes were gone. He trudged back to a mosque near his house, and collapsed. He saw his cousin, who had also attended the rally. “It was as if he had seen the day of judgement,” he said.
Things continued to get worse. In 2012, a bus ferrying Hazara children from Mari Abad to BUITEMS was attacked by an LeJ suicide bomber, killing four people and injuring 72, despite a police escort guarding it. Hussain was in the front seat of the bus. He remembered hearing an explosion and fainting. He remembered waking up to a sharp ringing in his ears, his younger sister screaming at the sight of his face, and him raising his hands to touch it. His face was covered by shards of glass from the bus’s windscreen. “It felt as if you had put my face through a meat churner and minced it,” he said. Following the attack, Hussain stopped taking the university bus to work, preferring to travel on his motorcycle. He said that he was looking for work elsewhere, but had not found anything that would sustain his family.
Although his injuries healed over time, Hussain said that such incidents contributed to the isolation of the Hazara, as other students no longer felt safe travelling in the same buses as them. A teacher at an all-girls college in Quetta recalled that her school refused to take Hazara students on field trips, saying that it would arrange a picnic for them inside the campus. She remembered public buses refusing to let Hazara passengers on for fear of attacks. She has since moved out of the country with her husband, but continues to fear for her family and students, which is why she did not want her name to be published.
The teacher remembered growing up in a mixed community, where she had Baloch neighbours who would often come over. “We would go borrow eggs from them in the middle of the night, and I would help their children with tuitions,” she said. However, as Hussain found, the next generation has not known such intermixing. Hazara youth tend to make friends with peers from other communities only when they leave Quetta for college.
Two major attacks in February 2013 killed over five hundred people, according to unofficial estimates. Things have marginally improved for the Hazara since: with greater protection and a targeted campaign by the military against the LeJ leadership, the attacks have decreased in frequency and intensity. But even the most minor incidents set the Hazara back by years, bringing back memories of a time when not a day went by without a dead body.
After four targeted attacks within the space of a month in April 2018, the community held protests outside the press club in Quetta, seeking to reclaim their city. Qamar Javed Bajwa, the chief of army staff, visited the protest site and spoke to Jalila Haider, the social activist leading the protest, giving assurances of greater security.
In the meantime, the memories of the attacks, and the isolation they brought, continue to haunt the Hazara. Hussain said he had last visited Hazara Town, another Hazara locality that is just a half-hour drive from Mari Abad, in 2010. Spinny Road, which connects the two neighbourhoods and has witnessed a large number of targeted attacks on the Hazara, remains a testament to the persecution they face. The community continues living in their enclosed spaces but never venturing into the city, and remembering the time when they were, as Hussain put it, “the people of Quetta and not Hazara.”