Death toll in Peshawar market blast rises to 117.
Juan Cole identifies those responsible:
Muslim extremists in Darra Adam Khel appear to have planned and carried out the attack, done by remote-controlled car bomb. They had threatened the markets with retribution if they did not forbid women to shop there. Pakistani extremists often preach ‘char divari’ or the immuring of women– keeping them within the four walls of their homes and forbidding them to go out at all. This idea, typical of Taliban sorts of thinking, is not Islamic and is contradicted by what we know of early Muslim history, in which women played an active and public role.
In any case, the extremists then bombed the area around these markets, since Kochi is a women’s market. At least 70 of the victims were women and children.
Darra Adam Khel is an Afridi Pashtun village in the North-West Frontier Province between Peshawar and the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Kohat (which itself witnessed a big bombing last week).
