TL;DR
At least 26 people are dead and curfews remain in force across northern Pakistan as Shia protests over the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei enter a third week with no sign of subsiding.
MSM Perspective
Reuters and Al Jazeera reported at least 26 dead and army deployments; the Washington Post covered continuing rallies in Islamabad a week after curfews were imposed.
X Perspective
Pakistani accounts on X are sharing graphic footage of security forces firing on crowds, framing the crackdown as proof Islamabad chose Washington over its own Shia citizens.
The protests that erupted across Pakistan on March 1 after the US-Israeli strike that killed Ayatollah Khamenei have not stopped. Reuters reported on March 5 that at least 26 people had been killed in clashes between Shia demonstrators and security forces, with the army deployed to enforce curfews in multiple northern cities. [1] Al Jazeera reported that the violence began when protesters attempted to storm the US consulate in Karachi on March 1, triggering a security response that left at least 20 dead in the first 48 hours. [2]
As this paper first reported, Pakistan's roughly 40 million Shia citizens viewed Khamenei's assassination as an attack on their religious identity, not merely Iranian geopolitics. Three weeks in, that fury has not dissipated. The Washington Post reported on March 6 that hundreds of Shia continued rallying in Islamabad and Lahore despite the curfew. [3] The LA Times described army deployments in cities that had not seen military presence since the 2014 counterterrorism operations. [4]
Islamabad is walking a tightrope. The government has not condemned the strikes that killed Khamenei, but it cannot suppress its own Shia population indefinitely without fracturing an already fragile domestic consensus.
-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi
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