PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN — The locale of the latest spasm of violence to strike Pakistan -- a car bomb attack that killed 100 people -- wasn't surprising. Perched on the fringe of the Taliban-infested badlands along the Afghan border, Peshawar has been hit several times by bombings that have claimed scores of lives this year.
But the target Wednesday marked a disturbing twist in the Islamic militants' agenda: a bustling market that catered to women, many of them with children in tow.
The blast, fueled by an estimated 220 pounds of explosives, ripped through the Meena Bazaar, a warren of fabric stalls, cosmetics shops and clothing stores that teems with women on afternoon shopping trips. More than 200 people were injured in the explosion, the deadliest terrorist strike ever in the city of 3 million. Several buildings along the market's narrow street were leveled, and the attack sent shock waves through a country already made weary by a monthlong campaign of violence that has now claimed at least 280 lives -- 167 of them in Peshawar.
At Lady Reading Hospital, wards were filled with badly wounded women, some with their injured children in the next beds.
"There was a massive blast, and then the roof of the fabric shop I was in fell on me," said Sameena, 18, who suffered a broken leg and broken hand. Like many Pashtun Pakistanis, she uses one name. "I saw shops burning, smoke and dead bodies everywhere, many of them women. These people are inhuman. They want to keep women inside homes. And they want to kill women."
The attack overshadowed the first day of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's three-day visit to Pakistan to discuss the fight against militants and to counter growing anti-American sentiment here.
At a news conference in Islamabad, the capital, Clinton condemned Wednesday's violence, calling it "cowardly."
"We feel strongly that the extremists and terrorists who deploy such violence have to be defeated wherever they are," she said. "This is a fight that cannot be avoided."
Suicide bombings and commando-style attacks have ravaged the country in the last month, a wave of violence that Pakistani officials say is the Taliban's answer to the government's decision to mount an all-out offensive to drive the militant group from South Waziristan, a rugged, underdeveloped region along the Afghan border.
