RAWALPINDI - THE anxious wives were on the phone again to their husbands in the Pakistani garrison town of Rawalpindi, a terrorist target where daily routine can turn to horror in an instant.

'She's very worried,' Abdul Habib said after putting down the receiver while visiting a friend's carpet shop close to the site of a bombing which left 35 people dead.

Not far from the carpet shop, Junaid Anwar Baig's wife had also phoned. 'She calls two or three times a day,' said Mr Baig, 62, who sells copper ornaments and other handicrafts. 'She always says: 'Be careful. Don't move around.''

Taleban and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists have carried out a two-year campaign of attacks that have killed more than 2,400 people in Pakistan, which has a population of around 167 million.

The indiscriminate killing, beamed into living rooms by television channels broadcasting round the clock, is cultivating a state of fear and uncertainty across Pakistan.

'The whole nation is in a state of trauma,' said Naima Hassan, a psychologist who has counselled victims of the attacks. There have around 300 blasts since the wave of violence began. Last week in north-western city Peshawar 118 people - many of them women and children - died in a market bombing that was the country's second-worst attack. -- AFP