On January 30, a bomb ripped through a congregation hall in Shikarpur, Pakistan, killing more than sixty people attending weekly Friday prayers. It was the most brutal attack on the Shia community since a car bomb went off in Karachi in 2013, killing forty-five.

On February 13, another suicide attack killed at twenty-one and wounded fifty. According to one estimate, in the last two years, about one thousand members of the Shia faith have been killed in attacks.

While the radical Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) carried out much of the violence over this time, Jundullah, a splinter faction of the banned group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), said they carried out the two most recent attacks. Famous for its suicide attacks both in Pakistan and Iran, Jundullah is a rebel Sunni group that has been funded by the Pakistani state intelligence agency (ISI) and the army in order to keep dissident nationalist elements in check.