Surrounded by Sunni rebel groups with a strongly sectarian ideology, its Shia inhabitants live in fear of being slaughtered.
There must surely have been some human spark between the two men, some bit of humanity untainted by sectarian ideology.
It is a fight against a violent sectarian ideology that finds breeding grounds in Europe's disenfranchised communities and in the killing fields of the Middle East.
Yet the unchecked killings have also raised wider questions about Pakistani society: about the spread of a cancerous sectarian ideology in a public that even just a decade ago seemed more tolerant, and about what might be spurring the growing audacity of the killers, some of whom are believed to have links to the country's security services.
LeJ is an Islamist group whose sectarian ideology is closely aligned with Islamic State, as it wants to kill or expel Pakistan's minority Shias and establish a Sunni theocracy.
The comparison is often drawn between Saudi Arabia and Iran as two regional powerhouses engaged in a struggle for domination of the Middle East, with a sectarian ideology of "Sunni vs Shia" hatred fueling their mutual ire.
While anti-sectarian ideology became a central plank of the Baath Party, factions within it could not escape their sense of identity and tallying of who was lining up with whom.
The mass protests in Lebanon that followed the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister, in February 2005 ended up deepening divisions in a country almost evenly split over questions of ideology, sectarian loyalty and foreign patrons.
One reason these theorists may have had for transitioning from actual to hypothetical consent is that they hoped to identify a rational justification of a political order that was not based on a sectarian theology or ideology which might happen to enjoy widespread, but probably not universal support within the relevant community.
-- ISIS implements savage sectarian division, an ideology promoted chiefly by Saudi Arabia, that now spills over into conflicts in Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
