Secular Pashtun party leader shot dead in Peshawar

ISLAMABAD: A city leader of the Pakistan’s Awami National Party (ANP), Sartaj Khan, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen on Saturday while traveling in his car in a residential area of Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar.
The gunmen were on a motorbike and left Khan, a member of the district council from Peshawar, critically wounded. He succumbed to his injuries at a local hospital.
The ANP, a largely secular, ethnic nationalist party, is drawn chiefly from the Pashtun ethnic group known to provide the Taliban with many of its recruits. The party has long competed with Islamist parties for votes in Pakistan’s volatile northwestern region bordering Afghanistan.
Saturday’s attack on Khan follows a violent trajectory of attacks made against the ANP’s party workers for years. The party’s stance that Pakistan should have a secular government instead of rule by Islamic law has made it a target for insurgents like the Pakistani Taliban, a band of militant and sectarian groups that have waged war on the state for over a decade.
More than 700 ANP workers, including some of the party’s highest ranking political candidates, were killed in attacks during and after the 2013 general election where the party managed to secure two national assembly seats.
In the run up to the 2018 election last year, ANP leaders focused on rebuilding the party and resumed campaigning on their anti-militancy platform despite more brutal attacks.