Nazia Iqbal, a singer from Peshawar who is known as much for her beauty as her popular melodies, retired this week from singing and joined the Tablighi, a conservative religious preaching group.

She was just one of a group of singers to make the enforced transformation.

Wagma, another Pashtu-language woman singer, said that she had also received death threats and joined the group of preachers.

"In the initial stage, I joined the group under threat, but now I have realised that this is a noble way of life and I shall stick to it and shall never return to singing," she said.

The death knell for Peshawar's once vibrant cultural life is one more indication that the Taliban has infiltrated the gates of Peshawar, a strategic frontier city close to the border with Afghanistan.

Peshawar, the capital of the troubled North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is a staging post from where the US is attempting to embark on development projects to counter the "Talibanisation" of the region.

But its citizens are increasingly bitter that the federal government has left them at the mercy of the Taliban and fear that the provincial capital could become the "next Swat" which will fall under the sway of the militants.

In the Valley of Swat, a former tourist destination in NWFP, militants embedded in the local population have forced the Pakistani army to agree to a peace deal and to impose sharia, or religious, law.

The same symptoms of Talibanisation that first surfaced in Swat have now appeared in Peshawar.

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