Mick Hartley

In Pakistan:

Huge numbers of goats, cows and even camels will be slaughtered in Pakistani on Wednesday homes to mark the Islamic holy day of Eid al-Adha.

The sacrificial offering of around 6m animals will allow families to fulfil a religious duty, guarantee some much appreciated meat handouts to the poor and provide nearly half of the annual requirement of the country's leather industry.

It will also generate an extraordinary cash windfall for some of Pakistan's most dangerous militant groups.

Thinly disguised front organisations have been gearing up to compete against each other and legitimate charities to collect as many animal skins as possible, which can then be sold on for cash.

"For us it is second only to Ramadan for our income," says an official from the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF).

FIF is the charitable wing of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), itself the reincarnation of one of south Asia's most dangerous militant groups, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a banned organisation dedicated to fighting jihad against India.

In Egypt:

[AP Photo/Manu Brabo]

Bloodstained water runs down the stairs at the gate of a charity center where animals were sacrificed on the first day of Eid al-Ahda in downtown Cairo, Egypt, on October 15, 2013.

In Iraq:

A bomb has ripped through a crowd of Sunni worshippers coming out of a mosque in northern Iraq after prayers at the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, killing 12 people and wounding 24, a police official has said.

The bomb went off on Tuesday morning as worshippers were leaving the al-Qodus mosque in the city of Kirkuk, 180 miles (290km) north of Baghdad.