By Staff Reporter
QUETTA: Two young Christian men were shot to death on Wednesday afternoon while playing cricket on a dusty pitch outside the southwestern city of Quetta, the latest in a string of attacks that has left Pakistan’s small and increasingly wary Christian minority searching for a way to feel safe in Balochistan province.
The gunmen struck at a cricket ground in Shams Abad, a cluster of homes about four kilometers from the Christian quarter of Mastung district, roughly 30 miles south of Quetta, the provincial capital. Police said the attackers rode up on motorcycles, opened fire on a group of local players, and were gone before anyone could react.
Killed were Ayush Masih, 21, and Domnik Masih, 24, both members of Mastung’s Christian community, according to Abdul Rauf, the station house officer at Mastung City police station. Both died at the scene.
“Two young cricketers were killed in the latest attack,” Rauf told Arab News, adding that the gunmen fled toward a nearby village. Police said they have opened an investigation and that security forces have launched a search operation, though no arrests had been announced as of Thursday.
Grief quickly turned to protest. Relatives and other members of the Christian community carried the bodies to the Quetta-Karachi National Highway and blocked traffic, according to Pakistani news reports, a gesture of anguish and defiance that has become a grim ritual after attacks on religious minorities in this part of the country.
By evening, ISIS-PK, a regional affiliate of the Islamic State group also known as Daesh, had claimed responsibility, according to a statement circulated by the group. Police said they were still working to establish the motive.
The killings landed with particular force because they came without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, on a cricket field rather than at a checkpoint or rally where security is at least a passing concern. For a community that has learned to measure risk by the calendar — holidays, Sundays, processions — an attack during a pickup match offered no such logic to hold onto.
Pakistan’s Christians, who make up a small fraction of the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim population, have been targeted before in Balochistan, though with less frequency than the province’s security forces or its Hazara Shiite minority, which has endured a long and bloody campaign of sectarian violence. Still, the roll call of past attacks on Christians here is not short.
In December 2017, Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for a suicide and gun assault on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta, killing at least nine worshippers and wounding dozens during a Sunday service. Four months later, in April 2018, gunmen shot dead four Christians riding in a rickshaw in Quetta, an attack also claimed by the militant group. Later that same month, assailants opened fire in the city’s Essa Nagri Christian neighborhood, killing two people and wounding three others. And in August 2022, unidentified gunmen struck a Christian enclave in Mastung itself, killing one man and injuring several others.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by land area but its least populated, sits along the borders of Afghanistan and Iran and has been shadowed for decades by overlapping insurgencies — ethnic Baloch separatists fighting for autonomy or independence, and religious militants seeking to impose their own order. Islamic State’s regional branch has used the province’s rugged terrain and thin security presence to operate with relative freedom, claiming past bombings and assassinations even as Pakistani security forces have announced periodic raids and claimed to have killed the group’s local commanders.
Wednesday’s attack arrived amid what has already been a bloody stretch for Balochistan. Pakistani officials this week described a string of major terrorist incidents across the province within a matter of days, including a police convoy ambush that left officers dead and several missing, and a blast that injured children playing near a religious school in Quetta’s Sariab area. Provincial authorities have blamed some recent violence on militants they say are crossing from Afghan territory, while continuing separately to battle Baloch insurgent groups.
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