That was when innocent children fell to bullets and humanity felt ashamed.
It was one of the darkest hours of the human history. It was the hour which broke our hearts, which made the entire world aghast. It was the hour of disgrace which gave a chill to the nerves of humanity. It was the winter of bloodbath. And it all began that morning – morning of that December, the winter of which was less harsh than what it was going to witness; when the kids left their homes for school and never returned. It was the day when children went to acquire the light of knowledge and faded into the eternity of grim darkness; when teachers were giving lessons and received bullets in wage. It all began the morning when a bunch of terrorists, laden with lethal arms, misled by their distorted religious ideologies, committed the terror that claimed lives of the buds which were yet to bloom.
Around 10:30 in the morning, on the 16th of December, seven heavily armed men in the guise of Pakistani Paramilitary Forces entered the premises of Army Public School in Peshawar. With the aim of inflicting maximum casualties, they opened fire on the innocent children and their teachers in the school auditorium. The incessant firing left over 150 dead among which 132 were students and remaining were the staff members. The spectacle aftermath was heart-rending – the bodies of innocent children lying dead and cold, their notebooks besmeared with innocent blood, the air smelling injustice and echoing the shuddering shrills of bewildered children who were injured.
Gunmen were killed and some children managed to get evacuated in the joint operation conducted by Pakistani Army and Police. While everybody was mourning over the massacre, TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) claimed the responsibility and termed it as the revenge against the Pakistan Army. Giving a thought to it, the sound conclusion is inevitable – if Pakistani Army launches an operation against the terrorism in order to make peace and security prevail in the state, in order to make churches safe for Christians and Mosques safe for Shia Muslims, in order to make markets safe for public and on and on. The question is why would TTP kill innocent children and justify their vindictive ingression into a school by calling it a righteous vengeance? Had those school children to do anything with this? No.
This is not Jihad, and certainly not what Islam teaches. This is not what Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) taught. This is outright brutality and the perpetrators of such brutal and outré ferocities are not human beings at all.
The children, who had left their homes to learn, left this world by inscribing in our hearts the saddest of memories. The Peshawar School Massacre was the massacre of future, hope, knowledge and truth. It was the massacre of spring. It was the massacre of humanity. Coffins of the children were resting on the people’s shoulders – the children upon whose shoulders their nation was hoping to stand. It was the funeral of despair and those were the smallest of coffins, and someone has rightly said: “Smallest coffins are the Heaviest” May their souls rest in Heavens and may Almighty bestow their Parents an everlasting strength.
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