Sitting behind locked doors operated through a digital security system, Hafeez Dhanani looks nervously around when he hears a knock at his door. As he finally opens it, his nervousness is still writ large on his face. He has been running a gift shop in Karachi’s Old Sabzi Mandi area for the last 20 years and claims never before did he see the security situation deteriorate in the area to the extent it has now. “I would keep the shop open well past midnight,” he says, “now the customers don’t visit even after dusk.” Dhanani closes his shop at 8:00 pm and with the deserted look that the streets wear around his shop, “I fear for my life more than for my business,” he says. He misses the days when he would sometimes go to sleep in the shop and the customers would come in and wake him up by knocking at the counter. “I wonder where those times have gone,” Dhanani adds wistfully as he works on a plastic cover for a school book.

Numerous people, like him, are struggling to cope with the changed realities of their lives across Karachi. “For the last three months or so, our life has totally come to a halt,” says Huma Kishwar, a 28-year-old resident of an apartment building in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighbourhood. Until recently, she and other residents of buildings around Old Sabzi Mandi were living life at its normal best. They could do their daily shopping and would go around with friends and family as late as 3:00 am. All that has changed now. With gunmen firing every now and then, even “our houses don’t seem safe,” says Kishwar who moved to the apartment building three years ago after her marriage. “As the gunmen constantly patrol the area, going somewhere even at 12:00 in day seems dangerous,” says her sister Nosheen Shahzad who has been living in the area for 17 years.

Residents say the gunmen wantonly stop people and harass them. Rozeena, a young maid who has been working in the locality for 10 years, tells the Herald how she saw the gunmen stop a motorcyclist, snatch his phone, wallet and watch and then beat him up before letting him go. I stood there watching, fearing for myself and not knowing what to do, she says.

Scout Colony, also located in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, is a similar recent flashpoint which has had no history of conflict. Peaceful and quiet only some time ago, it has seen violence disrupt life over the last few months. It all started when a political party began its political activities in a locality adjacent to Scout Colony. “This has resulted in heavy firing and even killing,” says Muhammad Zahid, a local resident.

Such woes about inconvenience, insecurity and danger are not specific to Old Sabzi Mandi or Gulshan-e-Iqbal. As Karachi violence is spreading to new areas, which only months earlier were peaceful, stories of public fear and anguish are quite common across other areas of the city. Many areas which are newly experiencing violence see their residents either shifting to other places in the city or being confined indoors like Dhanani.

What makes a bloody situation even bloodier is that violence is not just political and ethnic. Certainly it starts as an armed scramble for political, ethnic and – in some cases sectarian – space and dominance (see Map) but it does not remain confined to that. Land grabbing and extortion soon get added to the mix. It is with this that the citizens who having nothing to do with politics, sectarian difference and ethnic divides and get caught up in the middle of all the mayhem and bloodshed.

With violence having newly arrived in the Old Sabzi Mandi area, anecdotal evidence suggests that cases of land grabbing have multiplied there recently. Political activists have occupied many houses, whose owners are out of the city on either vacations or business, in apartment buildings such as Falak Numa and al-Rizwan. Many residents in Scout Colony have been forced to leave their houses during the last month or so. Local residents say armed men threaten people that they and their houses would be set on fire if they did not leave the area.

The victims of extortion – the second dangerous companion of political, ethnic and sectarian violence – are mostly businessmen and shopkeepers. Activists are out collecting money ostensibly on behalf of the groups they claim to represent. “I have to pay 500 rupees each to the activists of three parties every month,” says a shopkeeper near Memon Masjid at M A Jinnah Road. The negative impact on the business environment in the city, coupled with such payments, is forcing the traders to wonder whether the good old days of peace and commercial hustle and bustle would ever return to their areas.

They, however, may still count themselves lucky while comparing themselves with those living and doing business in the areas which have been flashpoints of violence for decades now. People in Qasba Colony, a major flashpoint for more than two decades now, have been going through the same ordeal day in and day out for all this while. The local residents complain that their neighbourhood has become a victim of its geographical location. Gunmen use a nearby locality called Muslimabad, located on a hilltop overlooking Qasba Colony, for taking potshots at those living in the foot of the hill. They have the advantage of their high location, says a local resident and adds that people living in the area cannot leave their houses at all during firing as they fear getting hit. Some local residents have fortified the entrances of their houses so as not to fall victim to the bullets piercing through the gates and doors. Not that the political party and the ethnic activists claiming to represent the residents of Qasba Colony are taking it lying down. They have set up pickets all over the neighbourhood and keep returning the fire regularly. During such exchanges of fire – which are quite frequent and heavy – “we become hostages in our own houses,” says a local resident. That this has been going on for well over 20 years certainly serves as a painful and troubling piece of information for those whose experience of suffering under violence is rather new.

With violence in Karachi spreading to new areas, serious questions have arisen about the ability of the law enforcement agencies to be able to check it. Most people wonder if the police and other security agencies can do anything at all to restore peace in neighbourhoods that were not violent until recently. The common refrain that the Herald heard from the Karachiites is that there is nothing that they expect from the law enforcers. If the police has been watching from the sidelines while areas like Qasba Colony have been suffering, for more than two decades, the best they can do is hope that they themselves do not become targets in the newly violent places.

Police officials sound as if they have no space or power to stop the violence. According to one police official’s view of, different parties are out to dominate the parts of the city that they deem as their exclusive domain. And when their domination is complete, the next thing they do is grab real estate and collect extortion money, he adds. Top ranked police officials say these parties have set up their offices almost everywhere in the areas of their dominance and their activists have started countering the law enforcement forces present in those areas which leads to increase in violence, the officials say. Such political activists possess weapons – either legal or illegal – in abundance but the law-enforcement agencies have to look the other way because political considerations hamper Sindh government from deciding whether and how to take such weapons back, they add.

In what is a vivid proof of this policy of look and overlook, young men carrying Kalashnikovs and police vans patrolling nearby are a common sight on the road leading towards the residential area near Old Sabzi Mandi. “A massive law- enforcement operation – that disregards politics – is the only solution to bring back peace and normalcy to all the flashpoint localities – both old and new, says Aijaz Shaikh, a senior police officer in Karachi’s district West.