At least 22 people are dead and more than 120 injured after pro-Iran rioters stormed the U.S. consulate in Karachi and attacked United Nations offices in northern Pakistan, unleashing a wave of coordinated violence across the country following the U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.
The bloodshed stretched from Pakistan's largest city to the remote mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan. Rioters breached the perimeter of the U.S. consulate in Karachi, smashed windows, and torched a nearby police post. In the north, thousands descended on offices of the U.N. Military Observer Group and the U.N. Development Programme, setting buildings ablaze.
And while Pakistani citizens burned American and international property, Pakistan's own leaders rushed not to condemn the violence but to mourn the man who inspired it.
According to Just the News, the worst of the violence erupted in Karachi, Pakistan's southern port city. Rioters attempted to storm the U.S. consulate as security forces responded with tear gas and gunfire to push back hundreds of demonstrators.
Summaiya Syed Tariq, a police surgeon at the city's main government hospital, confirmed six dead and multiple injured were brought to her facility. She later said the death toll climbed to 10 after four critically wounded people died. Senior police official Irfan Baloch said protesters briefly attacked the consulate's perimeter but were eventually dispersed. He acknowledged that rioters torched a nearby police post and smashed windows of the consulate before security forces regained control.
Protests in the area surrounding the consulate raged for hours, with stone-throwing youth, some covering their faces, vowing to reach the building where hundreds of police and paramilitary officers had been deployed.
Another 12 people were killed and more than 80 wounded in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan region, where thousands of rioters attacked the offices of the U.N. Military Observer Group and the U.N. Development Programme. Government spokesman Shabir Mir said all staff working for those organizations were safe but confirmed that protesters repeatedly clashed with police, damaged the offices of a local charity, and set fire to police offices.
Mir added that authorities had deployed troops and brought the situation under control.
Consider the target selection. The U.N. Military Observer Group. The U.N. Development Programme. These are not military outposts or instruments of American power. They are the kind of multilateral institutions that the international left constantly tells us represent the world's best hope for peace. The rioters torched them anyway.
The unrest was not confined to two cities. It metastasized across the country:
Authorities said the government stepped up security around the U.S. Embassy in the capital and consulates across Pakistan to prevent further violence.
The Pakistani government's response tells you everything. While rioters attacked American and international facilities on Pakistani soil, leaving bodies in the streets, the country's top officials competed to express solidarity with the dead Iranian supreme leader.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari expressed his "profound sorrow over the martyrdom" of Khamenei and conveyed condolences to Iran. His words:
Pakistan stands with the Iranian nation in this moment of grief and shares in their loss.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, the man theoretically responsible for domestic order, issued a statement that read less like a call for calm and more like a eulogy:
Following the martyrdom of Ayatollah Khamenei, every citizen of Pakistan shares in the grief of the people of Iran.
He did urge people not to take the law into their own hands and to express their protests peacefully. But note the framing. "Martyrdom." Not "death." Not "killing." The word chosen by every Islamist faction from Tehran to Beirut. Pakistan's interior minister used it as a matter of official state communication while his own security forces were firing tear gas at mobs attacking an allied nation's diplomatic facilities.
The provincial government of Sindh managed only to urge citizens to express their views peacefully and to warn against violence. A participation trophy of a statement.
Pakistan receives billions in American aid. It hosts American diplomatic missions. It has been, on paper, a U.S. partner in counterterrorism for more than two decades. And when mobs stormed the U.S. consulate, Pakistan's president called the man who inspired the attack a "martyr" and said his nation shares Iran's grief.
Not one senior Pakistani official publicly condemned the storming of the U.S. consulate. Not one expressed concern for American diplomatic personnel under siege. Not one acknowledged that the rioters, not the United States, bore responsibility for the dead.
The statements from Zardari and Naqvi both adopted the language of Iran's theocratic regime. "Martyrdom" is not a neutral term. It is a theological and political declaration that Khamenei died righteously and that those who killed him are the aggressors. When a supposed American ally frames a hostile foreign leader's death that way while American property burns, the word "ally" needs quotation marks.
None of this emerged from thin air. Pakistan's relationship with Iran, and with Shia militant networks that operate with varying degrees of state tolerance, has long complicated the fiction of a clean U.S.-Pakistan partnership. The speed and coordination of these protests, erupting simultaneously in Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, and Gilgit-Baltistan, suggests infrastructure that existed long before Saturday's strikes.
Thousands of rioters don't materialize overnight. The networks that mobilized them were already in place, already organized, already waiting for a trigger. The killing of Khamenei provided one. Something else would have provided another.
Authorities have deployed troops in Gilgit-Baltistan and claim to have restored order. Security has been reinforced around every U.S. diplomatic facility in the country. The immediate crisis may be contained.
But the deeper problem remains untouched. Pakistan's government chose the language of solidarity with Iran over solidarity with the United States, its ostensible ally, while American facilities burned. That choice was not made under duress. It was made by calculation.
Twenty-two people are dead. American diplomatic property was breached. U.N. offices were gutted by fire. And Pakistan's president said he stands with Iran.
Washington should take him at his word.
