Terror Analysis Part 2: Pakistan Crisis and war against TLP

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Analytics Vidhya

6 min readApr 17, 2021

Yesterday the top trend on Twitter in India was #civilwarinpakistan. Then I read about France issuing a warning to its citizens via email to leave Pakistan immediately. While we have been occupied with corona second wave Total of 13 people have died in Pakistan so far, 1 cop, and 12 TLP workers. Pakistan govt is now pondering over the decision to ban the radical party.

Islamophobia in France

A few months back world was shocked to learn about the beheading of school teacher Sam patty. France reacted strongly to it and decided to stand firm behind the teacher and the blasphemy considering it freedom of expression which is the core value of french democracy. Multiple countries were enraged at the stance of the French govt, with Pakistan at the forefront. Pakistan’s PM gave a lengthy statement against islamophobia globally.

Khadim Rizvi

While the Pakistan govt tried their best to call out the french govt their public wanted more; From boycotting all products to ousting all French ambassadors, nuking France, and beheading Emanuel Macron. At the forefront was a man called Khadim Hussain Rizvi leader of a Radical right-wing party TLP that fought elections last year. He sensed an opportunity to rise by provoking the radical Islamic population of Pakistan. He put forth some demands for the Pakistani govt which were almost impossible for the govt to accept.

Immediately after that Khadim Hussain Rizvi started the protest march on the Murree Road of the city of Rawalpindi.

Riot police had to resort to teargas shelling against the stone-pelting TLP protesters who succeeded to reach the Faizabad interchange connecting Rawalpindi and Islamabad, where they launched their sit-in.

After 2 days ruling party intervened and accepted all their demands in writing, requested them to lift their blockade.

Just 2 weeks after that Khadim Rizvi died an unnatural death with little known about his death (Sources say ISI got rid of him because what he demanded was not possible for Pakistan to accept). We cannot ignore that Pakistan has a lot of dependencies on France, from using squadrons of mirage to getting monetary aids from France and being preferential trade partners helps their farmers a lot. Pakistan cannot afford to lose all these favors they receive from the rich western countries.

We assumed that the TLP would be silenced after khadim’s death but since the last few days, we saw the reemergence of TLP under the leadership of Saad Rizvi. The protest now is far more violent than it was earlier and saad stronger than ever. Banning them won’t solve the crisis

When did Khadim Rizvi emerge as a player in Pakistan’s political scene?

The Barelvis are close to 50 percent of Pakistan’s population, but they do not have the political profile of the Deobandis and the Ahl-e-Hadees. The Barelvi school of thought was once sought to be projected as the softer face of Islam, but that project went to pieces in 2011 after the assassination of former Punjab governor Salman Taseer.

Salman Taseer’s assassin Mumtaz Qadri was a Barelvi, who proclaimed that he had killed Taseer because he had spoken out in support of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who had been jailed for alleged blasphemy.

Qadri was a follower of Khadim Rizvi, who has been vocal in opposing any reforms to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and sees any attempt to do so as an attack on the Holy Prophet’s honor.

This is not the first time TLP has called for protest, when Asia Bibi was acquitted from blasphemy charges he led violent protests in the country and paralyzed the entire country. He was released only when Asia Bibi left the country.

Terrorism Analysis of Pakistan

Now that this is the new radical group emerging which can shake the politics of Pakistan, I wanted to study the terrorism trends in Pakistan.

We will start with downloading the global terror data from Kaggle.

After downloading we can open our notebook and start,

import pyforest
terror=pd.read_csv("terror.csv")
pak_=terror[terror["country_txt"]=="Pakistan"]
pak.head()

Attacks per year in Pakistan

import math
import numpy as np 
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as snsimport plotly.express as px
import plotly.graph_objs as gofrom matplotlib.ticker import FuncFormatter,ScalarFormatter
import matplotlib.animation as animation
from IPython.display import HTMLfrom plotly.offline import plot, iplot, init_notebook_mode
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)
%matplotlib inline
pd.options.mode.chained_assignment = None
sns.set(style="darkgrid")plt.figure(figsize=(24,12))
sns.countplot(x = "iyear", data = pak)
plt.title("Attacks per Year")

Mode of attacks in Pakistan

pak["city"].fillna("Unknown", inplace = True)
pak["nkill"].fillna(0, inplace = True)
figure = px.scatter(pak, x="iyear", y="provstate", color="attacktype1_txt",size="nkill", hover_name="provstate", log_x=True, size_max=80, title = "Attack in pakistan each Year")figure.show()

People killed in the world by weapons

px.pie(terror, names = "attacktype1_txt", values = "nkill", title = "Percentage of Kills with specific Weapon")

People killed in Pakistan by different weapons

px.pie(pak, names = "attacktype1_txt", values = "nkill", title = "Percentage of Kills with specific Weapon")

Bombing/ Explosion cases are higher in Pakistan because terrorist organizations mostly opt for bomb attacks while armed assaults are more common in the western world.

Terrorism over the last 4 decades

1. Pakistan terrorist attack in the '80s

pak_80 = pak[(pak['iyear'] == 1980) | (pak['iyear'] == 1981) | (pak['iyear'] == 1982)|(pak['iyear'] == 1983)|(pak['iyear'] == 1984)|(pak['iyear'] == 1985)|(pak['iyear'] == 1986)|(pak['iyear'] == 1987)|(pak['iyear'] == 1988) |(pak['iyear'] == 1989)]

Al Zulfiqar was a left-wing militant organization formed by the sons of Zulfiqar Bhutto after he was assassinated in a military coup by Zia-Ul-Haq.

2.Pakistan terrorist attack in the '90s

pak_90 = pak[(pak['iyear'] == 1990) | (pak['iyear'] == 1991) | (pak['iyear'] == 1992)|(pak['iyear'] == 1993)|(pak['iyear'] == 1994)|(pak['iyear'] == 1995)|(pak['iyear'] == 1996)|(pak['iyear'] == 1997)|(pak['iyear'] == 1998) |(pak['iyear'] == 1999)]

pak_90["gname"].value_counts()

weapon Detail

pak_90["weapdetail"].value_counts()

MQM was a party formed by Altaf Hussain for the mujahirs in 1984. Mujahir is a term used for Muslims who migrated from India to Pakistan after partition. The party had a stronghold in the Sindh province.

Province wise count

pak_90["provstate"].value_counts()

3. Pakistan terrorist attack in the '20s

pak_20 = pak[(pak['iyear'] == 2000) | (pak['iyear'] == 2001) | (pak['iyear'] == 2002)|(pak['iyear'] == 2003)|(pak['iyear'] == 2004)|(pak['iyear'] == 2005)|(pak['iyear'] == 2006)|(pak['iyear'] == 2007)|(pak['iyear'] == 2008) |(pak['iyear'] == 2009)]

pak_20["gname"].value_counts()

Weapon Detail

pak_20["weapdetail"].value_counts()

Province Detail

pak_20["provstate"].value_counts()

4. Pakistan terrorist attack in the 21st century

pak_21 = pak[(pak['iyear'] == 2010) | (pak['iyear'] == 2011) | (pak['iyear'] == 2012)|(pak['iyear'] == 2013)|(pak['iyear'] == 2014)|(pak['iyear'] == 2015)|(pak['iyear'] == 2016)|(pak['iyear'] == 2017)]pak_21["gname"].value_counts()