On the morning of February 18th, Dr. Syed Ali Haider, a forty-six-year-old eye surgeon in Lahore, was driving with his eleven-year-old son, Mustafa Haider from their home in upper-middle class Gulberg, a quiet area of mansions on tree-lined avenues, to Aitcheson College, a high school established by the British, which has groomed a few generations of Lahore élite. As Dr. Haider stopped at a traffic light, armed militants on motorbikes surrounded his car, opened fire, and sped away. His driver, who was in the back seat, escaped unhurt and called the police. The doctor had been shot six times in the head and was dead when help arrived; his son, who had been shot once in the head, died later in a hospital.

Dr. Haider came from a much-regarded Lahore family; his relatives were renowned doctors and members of the judiciary. Nobody claimed responsibility for his killing, but everyone in Lahore suspected the Sunni extremist militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has been involved in numerous attacks on Pakistan’s Shia minority. “This is a sectarian killing. Ali had no personal enmity,” Justice Syed Fazal Haider, his uncle and a retired High Court Judge, told the Pakistani press.

A few days after the murders, I met Professor Osama Siddique, who had returned to teach at Lahore University of Management Sciences after getting his doctorate at Harvard Law School. Siddique’s son goes to the same school as the slain boy, and told him, “I knew Mustafa. I used to teach him how to play cricket at school.” Lahore had largely been unaffected by the frequent violence in Pakistan, but the new wave of attacks on the Shia minority, which constitutes around twenty per cent of Pakistan’s population of a hundred and eighty million, had left the city stunned.

***

A sense of siege and hopelessness is engulfing the Shias of Pakistan. I travelled from Lahore to Pakistan’s financial capital Karachi, where the graffiti seemed to foretell coming murders. Even in the commercial center, where sultry models advertised designer apparel on billboards, the letters “S.S.P.” were painted on walls in red—for Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the Army of the Companions of the Prophet Pakistan, the mothership of sectarian militancy in Pakistan. On my second morning in the city, the newspapers reported a “targeted attack” on Lieutenant Commander Syed Azeem Haider Kazmi of Pakistan Navy, a Shia. Kazmi was driving to work in the morning when assassins fired at him; he died a week later. Earlier, another Shia naval officer was injured after an improvised explosive device exploded beneath his car.

The sectarian war in Pakistan has grown in tandem with the wider radicalization of its society. The country’s Shias and Sunnis largely lived together peacefully till the nineteen-eighties. The downward slide began during the dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq, who ruled Pakistan between 1979 and 1987. After the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Sunni-led governments like Saudi Arabia feared that Ayatollah Khomeini would export Shiite ideas and influence. Saudis gave financial support to General Zia, and, in turn, Zia patronized radical Wahhabi-like Sunni clerics in Pakistan. A wave of new seminaries opened, some no more than storefronts, from which clerics issued fatwas and declared Shias heretics and apostates. As Pakistan got involved in the Soviet war in Afghanistan (which is also mostly Sunni), the power of religious extremists grew. Many of the Taliban came from the seminaries that Zia had helped build.

In 1985, in Jhang—a small town in Punjab—a group of Sunni extremist clerics led by Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi formed the S.S.P. It positioned itself as a political party, with the aim of declaring Pakistan a Sunni state, and even won some seats in the National Assembly. In 1996, a breakaway faction that felt the organization wasn’t violent enough formed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi—the Army of Jhangvi.

After 9/11, General Pervez Musharraf banned both Sunni and Shia sectarian militant groups, but it did little to ebb the violence against Shias. The legal system has been notably weak when it comes to investigations and prosecutions of sectarian violence. In the early two-thousands, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi frequently targeted Shia professionals. During Musharraf’s first term in office, from 1999-2003, around six hundred Shias were killed in sectarian violence. In 2003, The Friday Times weekly newspaper reported that around five hundred Shia doctors had fled Pakistan in the space of a few years, after more than fifty of their colleagues were assassinated in Karachi.

By 2009, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistani Taliban, a coalition of militants operating out of the tribal areas of Pakistan, was carrying out lethal bombings throughout Pakistan; several former Lashkar-e-Jhangvi leaders had assumed important positions within its ranks. And sectarian violence has intensified. “The attacks on the Shia community increased radically in the past year. As the national elections are a few months away, the militants sense a lack of political will within the political parties to go after them,” a Lahore-based newspaper editor told me.

***

A week after Dr. Haider’s murder, Lahore’s middle and upper classes tried to fight back symbolically, gathering in thousands at the city’s first literary festival. A certain sense of purpose was palpable in the sessions; writers and journalists spoke passionately about the sectarian violence, and their critiques made headlines in the English press. Although the festival mostly drew an English-speaking, upper-class crowd, it also attracted students from Pakistan’s villages. Raza Wazir, a twenty-two-year-old literature student originally from Waziristan, where drone strikes and Taliban attacks are a routine, had come to festival by way of Ferguson College in Lahore. He had dutifully attended every session for two days. He had lingered at the bookstalls, noting the titles of books, but found them too expensive to buy. “I realized how important it is to write and tell your own stories. People from places like Waziristan have always been spoken about; we have never told our own stories,” Wazir told me. He wanted to write and wanted to know how to write, how to process the violent world he had inherited.

Four days after the festival opened, on February 25th, a bomb exploded at a Sufi shrine in Shikarpur, a few hours from Karachi, killing three and injuring more than twenty worshippers. Soon after the explosion, a tweet came from @JHANGVI, the group’s account:

Central Jail RYK; Me ny Sirf Ek Allah k Smny Jhukna Sekha hy Me Unka Waris Ni Jinhon ny Darbaron ki Dehleez Chati ho Malik Ishaq sb [I bow only to God. I am not an heir of those who prostrate at shrines.]

Terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi consider not only the Shias but also Pakistani Sunnis, who venerate shrines of Sufi mystics, as infidels deserving death. In the summer of 2011, Jhangvi sent an open letter to the Shia community in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province and home to around six hundred thousand Shias from the Hazara tribe. The letter, written in Urdu and signed by the commander of Jhangvi, read: