KARACHI: The Counterterrorism Department (CTD) in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province said on Thursday the Iran-backed Zainabiyoun Brigade had carried out at least 17 sectarian killings in Karachi between last September to February this year, which were previously believed to be incidents of street crime.
The US Treasury placed the Zainabiyoun Brigade on its financial blacklist in January 2019 as part of a “pressure campaign to shut down the illicit networks the (Iranian) regime uses to export terrorism and unrest across the globe.” 
Many of the group’s fighters are believed to have been recruited from Pakistan by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia, and trained for operations in the Syrian civil war, which broke out in 2011. 
Some of the recruits have since returned to Pakistan, especially during COVID-19 pandemic closures, authorities say, prompting them to step up their crackdown on the group’s activities. Islamabad banned the group last month, saying it was a potential threat to security. 
“In the last few months of 2023 and the first few months of 2024, there was a sudden increase in targeted killings in Karachi, which initially appeared to be deaths due to resistance in street crimes,” a CTD statement released on Thursday said.
“When the CTD investigated these incidents, it was found that from September 2023 to February 2024, in addition to street crimes, there were nearly 17 sectarian targeted killings … Upon further technical and forensic investigation of the network involved, it was revealed that terrorists from the banned organization Zainabiyoun were involved in these acts of terrorism.”
The CTD said local militants belonging to the group were getting their targets, funds and other facilities from a man named Syed Hussain Mousavi alias Muslim who used one group to perform reconnaissance and another to take out targets. 
According to the CTD, sectarian killings carried out by the group had stopped in the city after two Zainabiyoun militants, Waqar Abbas and Hussain Akbar, were jailed following their arrest in a case involving the possession of illegal weapons.
Another team of sectarian killers originally from Gilgit-Baltistan had gone underground since the arrest of their accomplices, the statement said. 
In January, the CTD in Sindh said it had arrested a “trained terrorist” belonging to the Zainabiyoun Brigade in Karachi who was accused of an assassination attempt on a top Pakistani cleric.
Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a former Pakistan top court judge and a permanent member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s International Islamic Fiqh Academy, narrowly escaped the assassination attempt in the port city in March 2019. The attack had killed two of Usmani’s guards and wounded a fellow religious scholar, Maulana Amir Shahabullah.
Karachi, a metropolis of 20 million that hosts the stock exchange and central bank, has for decades been beset by armed violence. 
While an armed campaign by the military, with help from police, paramilitary Rangers and intelligence agencies, against armed gangs and suspected militants in the city brought down murder rates after 2013, street crimes have been on the rise again since last year, with shooting deaths in muggings and robberies once again becoming a daily headline.