Islamabad on Edge

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Islamabad, once the safest city in the country, feels under siege, as the war has crept across the border from Afghanistan, now slowly into the capital with near daily Taliban bombings and shootings. Constant threats of suicide attacks have spread unaccustomed panic. Schools are closed. Shopping malls are deserted. Traffic has thinned. With winter approaching, evenings are darker and quieter with a foreboding air.

“I’m concerned about my children and their future,” said Saba Sharif, 27, a mother of three children, who range in age from one to five years old. “Yesterday, I was talking to my husband’s sister who is in Canada. She said that we should apply for immigration to Calgary.”

And it’s not just personal safety: Her husband, Usman, 33, leases a coal mine near Islamabad. But the deteriorating security situation is making him feel jittery about his heavy investment.

Though Pakistan is hardly immune to violence, Islamabad, with the grand Hindu Kush to the north and east, once had a serene quality to it.

Now diplomats are drawing contingency plans, fearing bigger attacks and nervous that suicide attackers may enter the city’s heavily guarded diplomatic zone. People have started forwarding short text messages on their cellphones, warning friends and relatives about places that might be possible targets or to ensure that vehicles are locked while idling at traffic signals to deter any hostage-taking attempts by bombers on the loose. Security checkpoints and barriers cause long queues of cars and people fear this might actually attract a terrorist attack.

Madeeha Hazoor, 27, said that while Pakistan has been dangerous for some time, she has only begun to feel it in the capital recently.

“My brother was in a building, which a suicide bomber attacked; a friend’s father was in a target killing and many other people I know were close to an area that was attacked minutes later,” she said.

“ People are avoiding going out, my office has told us to work from home, whenever us friends have to hang out - we try and plan something at someone’s house rather than at a restaurant,” she said. “If I do go to eat out, I visualize which seat would be safest to sit at in case of an attack!”

Beenisch Tahir, a freelance writer for an English-language daily, said: “Being used to a peaceful Islamabad, where safety was the last thing that ever entered our minds, having it ruined because of terrorism in the last two years especially makes me angry.’

“Many of us just refuse to give up our right to normalcy,” she said.

But a new normal is evolving here, which some find as disturbing as the attacks themselves. Grim news, killings and scenes of devastation are now all too frequent and give terrorism a strange, disturbing sense of familiarity.

“Maybe we’re desensitized,” Ms. Tahir said. “Or maybe we’re just sick of living like this for the last few years and just can’t take it anymore. Now I check the news like I check a game for the score.”

“It is sad,” she said.