Benazir Bhutto whom she was a champion of democracy and women's rights. Bhutto was born on 21 June 1953 in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Her father was the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and her mother was Begum Nusrat Ispahani, of Iranian Kurdish parentage. Zulfikar was the son of Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a prominent politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Junagadh State. The Bhuttos were aristocratic, wealthy landlords from Sindh. They were Sunni Muslims, although Nusrat had been born into a Shia Muslim family before converting to Sunnism on her marriage. The couple had married in September 1951, and
Benazir Bhutto retracted this claim. In September 1996, the Taliban secured power in Afghanistan. Bhutto's government was one of only three countries to recognise it as the legitimate Afghan government, a move that further distanced it from its Western allies. Benazir Bhutto was prime minister at a time of great racial tension in Pakistan. Ethnic violence had again broken out in Sindh as muhajir—mobilised by the MQM—rioted in protest at what they saw as their poor treatment. To deal with the unrest, Bhutto permitted her interior minister, Naseerullah Babar, to launch Operation Blue Fox, a violent crackdown on the MQM. By the