Pakistan - For Our Children

16 December 2014 is one of the worst days Pakistan has had to live through since its inception. This national tragedy, which has caused unimaginable grief and pain across the landscape, will not and must not be forgotten anytime soon. Muhammad Khorasani of Jamat-ul-Ahrar, also known as Omer Khorasani, of the Jamat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan led by Mullah Fazlullah, has accepted responsibility for the attack on the school. In his statement given to the media, the militant commander termed the attack as retaliation for the ongoing military operation in FATA.
Some say that at a time like this, it is not wise and appropriate to blame the government or state institutions. Such a tragedy calls for unity, and criticism doesn’t help to achieve that purpose. But no consensus can be built, no wrong can be corrected, no problem can be solved by deciding against speaking the truth. And the truth is this: Not just terrorists, but everyone, from the wider population to the civil and military leadership is responsible for the barbarity our children were subjected to.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, your government has contributed absolutely nothing towards building a narrative against extremism. Operation Zarb-e-Azb started without your permission, and it continues absent meaningful political ownership. You have refused to act against seminaries funded through Saudi money, which are poisoning the minds of our youth and turning them into zealots. Instead of putting them behind bars, the Punjab government protects sectarian elements as they return the favour by not attacking you and taking out rallies in your support.
Chairman Imran Khan, you are the most mainstream and consistent Taliban sympathiser in the country. Despite the murder of 132 children in the capital of the province where your party is in power, you couldn’t muster the courage to name the Taliban. You have done a great disservice to this nation by repeatedly justifying the murder of your fellow countrymen and pushing a toxic narrative based on factual inaccuracies and ignorance.
Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif, despite all that has happened, despite the many sacrifices of the brave soldiers who have died fighting terrorists, you refuse to employ a blanket policy against non-state actors. While the military conducts operations against bad Taliban in FATA, it continues to protect sectarian elements in Quetta, the Afghan Taliban and other ‘jihadi’ organisations such as Jamat-ud-Dawa. The country is reaping what it has sown over decades.
Citizens, you seek comfort in conspiracy theories to avoid facing the ugly truth. What will it take for you to unite against extremism unequivocally and without provisos?
The idea is not to berate or discourage, but to offer a reality check and prompt change of policy for the sake of our children, for the sake of our country’s future. Only the truth will set us free.

Pakistan - Devils butcher our little angels

NADER BUNERI/AGENCIES

MERCILESS, CALLOUS, INHUMANE... n Taliban gunmen bomb, shoot to death 132 children at Peshawar army school n 9 staff also killed n TTP calls it revenge for Zarb-e-Azb n Militants pump bullets even into dead students n Set teacher on fire & force kids to watch it n Hospitals echo with distraught parents’ cries

Taliban militants mercilessly killed at least 141 people, 132 of them children, after storming an army-run school on Tuesday in one of the bloodiest-ever attacks in the country. 
Witnesses described how a huge blast shook the Army Public School in Peshawar and six gunmen in paramilitary (FC) uniforms went from classroom to classroom, shooting children, some as young as 10. 
Chief military spokesman General Asim Bajwa said 132 students and nine staff were killed in the eight-hour onslaught at the army-run school.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the assault, calling it revenge for a major military offensive in the tribal region.
Surviving students said the militants even pumped bullets into the dead bodies of students. Any movement behind the classroom desks and chairs would spark further firing. Some students saved their lives by acting dead. 
Another report said that the militants burnt a teacher alive and forced the students to watch it. Another militant blew himself up in a room crowded with over 60 students. Another entered the school’s packed auditorium and fired ruthlessly, hitting most students in the heads and torsos. 
The Lady Reading Hospital was thronged with distraught parents weeping uncontrollably as children’s bodies arrived, their school uniforms drenched in blood. 
Irshadah Bibi, 40, whose 12-year-old son was among the dead, beat her face in grief, throwing herself against an ambulance. 
“O God, why did you snatch away my son. What is the sin of my child and all these children,” she wept. 
Police officials said the attack ended around 6.30pm, some eight hours after it began, with all six militants dead. 
Inter-Service Public Relations DG Gen Asim Bajwa said the building has been cleared. There were fears that the militants might have planted explosives inside to target the forces. However, the operation was completed with due care and the premises handed over to the civil administration, he added. 
He maintained that two teachers and as many students were evacuated in the final phase of the operation. The dead body of the principal, identified as Tahira Qazi, was also recovered after the last phase of the search operation. 
He said the terrorists tried to run away from the school, but they were targeted by the forces from outside the building. 
He said the terrorists had been identified. They were getting instructions from an undisclosed location which had been traced. They had also brought a huge quantity of ammunition and food to fight for long hours. 
Taliban gunmen made no demands and started killing children as soon as they entered the building, General Asim Bajwa said. 
“They didn’t take any hostages initially and started firing,” he said. 
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif described the attack as a “national tragedy unleashed by savages”.
“These were my children. This is my loss. This is the nation’s loss,” he said. The PM announced 3-day national mourning. 
The school on Peshawar’s Warsak Road is part of the Army Public Schools and Colleges System, which runs 146 schools nationwide for the children of military personnel and civilians. Its students range in age from around 10 to 18. 
Only one terror attack in Pakistan’s 67-year history has produced nearly as much death toll: the October 2007 blasts targeting former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Karachi, which killed 139. 
TTP spokesman Muhammad Khorasani said Tuesday’s assault was carried out to avenge Taliban fighters and their families killed in the army’s offensive against militant strongholds in North Waziristan. 
“We are doing this because we want them to feel the pain of how terrible it is when your loved ones are killed,” he said. 
“We are taking this step so that their families should mourn as ours are mourning.” 
As night fell on Peshawar, a teeming, volatile city near the Afghan border, security forces finally wrapped up the operation that lasted more than eight hours and involved sometimes intense gunbattles. 
Outside, as helicopters rumbled overhead, police struggled to hold back distraught parents who were trying to break past a security cordon and get into the school. 
Officials said 122 people were wounded. A local hospital said the dead and injured were aged from 10 to 20 years old. 
The gunmen, several students said, communicated with each other in a foreign language and managed to slip past the school’s tight security because they were wearing paramilitary uniforms. 
It recalled the 2004 siege of a school in Russia’s Beslan by Chechen militants which ended in the death of more than 330 people, half of them children. 
In September, 2013, however, dozens of people, including many children, were killed in an attack on a church, also in Peshawar. 
On reaching behind the school, the militants first torched their own vehicle, indicating the dastardly, suicidal mission they had set on. There were 2,500 students inside the school at the time of the attack. 
A student, one of the eyewitnesses, told The Nation that the militants went room to room and targeted the students ruthlessly while some of them took the classroom chairs as shields to save their lives. He said the terrorists did not show any mercy and it was terrible when he saw her classmates in a pool of blood. 
The terrorists also lobbed grenades on entering the school. At least one of the terrorists blew himself up. 
A father of two students said that his two sons ran out when the militants were engaged by the security forces inside the building. 
Pak Army special commandos encircled the building, and killed all the six attackers. A heavy contingent of police was also deputed to back the army commandos. The police provided a security cover to the second row of the armymen. 
Funerals of many of the martyrs had taken place by the evening, with the rest to follow on Wednesday. 
Sajid Khan, the uncle of 10-year-old student Gul Sher, told a news agency his nephew had plans to become a doctor, but instead he is in a casket.
“We cannot take the revenge from the terrorists but we pray to God to take our revenge,” he said. 
The assault on the school could push the armed forces into a more drastic response. 
Another student told a private TV channel: “The attackers had long beards, wore shalwar kameez (traditional baggy clothes) and spoke Arabic.” Schools in the KP province will remain closed for three days.

Pakistan - New blood-soaked benchmark

IT was an attack so horrifying, so shocking and numbing that the mind struggles to comprehend it. Helpless schoolchildren hunted down methodically and relentlessly by militants determined to kill as many as quickly as possible.

As a country looked on in shock yesterday, the death count seemed to increase by the minute. First a few bodies, dead schoolchildren in bloodied uniforms, then more bodies, and then more and more until the number became so large that even tracking it seemed obscene.

Peshawar has suffered before, massively. But nothing compares to the horror of what took place yesterday in Army Public School, Warsak Road. The militants found the one target in which all the fears of Pakistan could coalesce: young children in school, vulnerable, helpless and whose deaths will strike a collective psychological blow that the country will take a long time to recover from, if ever.

In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, the focus must be the grieving families of the dead, the injured survivors and the hundreds of other innocent children who witnessed scenes that will haunt them forever.

Even in a society where violence is depressingly endemic and militant attacks all too common, the sheer scale of yesterday’s attack demands an extraordinary effort by every tier of the state — and society — to help the victims in every way possible.

For the survivors, the state can help ensure the best medical treatment, for both physical and psychological wounds, and rehabilitation. All too often, after the initial shock wears off and the TV cameras move on, the level of care and attention given to survivors drops precipitously. That must not be the case this time.

For the families of the dead, the state can find a way to honour their sacrifices beyond announcing so-called shaheed packages and promising to disburse cheques. It is also incumbent on wider society and the media to ensure that this time the state does more than the bare minimum.

Inevitably, the hard questions will have to be asked and answers will have to be found. Schools are by definition vulnerable, the trade-off between security and access making for a relatively soft target. Yet, vulnerability ought not to mean a disaster on this scale can occur so easily.

Where was the intelligence? The military has emphasised so-called intelligence-based operations against militants in recent months, but this was a spectacular failure of intelligence in a city, and an area within that city, that ought to have been at the very top of the list in terms of a security blanket.

Then there is the issue of the operation to find and capture or kill the militants after the attack had begun. The sheer length of the operation suggests the commanders may not have had immediate access to the school’s layout and there was no prior rescue plan in place.

Surely army public schools are under high enough risk to have merited some kind of advance planning in case of such an attack. Was that plan in place? Had there been any drills at the school to help the children know what to do in the eventuality of an attack? Who was responsible for such planning? Most importantly, will lapses be caught, accountability administered and future defences modified accordingly? The questions are always the same, but answers are hardly forthcoming.

The questions about yesterday’s attack can go on endlessly. They should. But what about the state’s willingness and ability in the fight against militancy? Vows to crush militancy in the aftermath of a massive attack are quite meaningless.

From such events can come the will to fight, but not really a strategy. Military operations in Fata and counterterrorism operations in the cities will amount to little more than fire-fighting unless there’s an attempt to attack the ideological roots of militancy and societal reach of militants.

Further, there is the reality that militancy cannot be defeated at the national level alone. Militancy is a regional problem and until it is addressed as such, there will only be a long-term ebb and flow of militancy, cycles destined to repeat themselves. Perhaps the starting point would be for the state to acknowledge that it does not quite have a plan or strategy as yet to fight militancy in totality. Denial will only lead to worse atrocities.

Peshawar attack ‘most barbaric, atrocious’, says Zardari

Asif Ali Zardari on Tuesday denounced the terrorist attack on the school in Peshawar as “most barbaric, atrocious and inhuman that will hang the heads of every civilized person in any age and any clime’.

In a statement denouncing the incident the former President said the Boko Haram of Pakistan striking in the fashion of their kinsmen in Africa on Tuesday morning in Peshawar by targeting school children is a dark day in the history of this country. The crime has been committed on a dark day of our history when Pakistan was dismembered this day in 1971, he said. The monstrous cruelty and sheer barbarism together with the symbolism of perpetrating it today should open the eyes of all those who give the nation lectures that the exterminated militants are ‘martyrs in the cause of a noble fight’. Let there be no doubt or mistake that the religious extremists and fanatics are the worst enemies of the country and its people. There is no alternative to fight them to the finish for the very survival of Pakistan and our future generations. The absence of alternative to fighting the monster must make the mind of every self-proclaimed puritan very clear, the former President said. Zardari said that this incident should also strengthen the resolve of the nation to stand together against this existential threat to the security and stability of the country. ‘Let us be clear’, the former President said, adding also, ‘the enemy is not external but internal; it lives and thrives in our midst and is nurtured and sustained in the name of religion’.

Expressing profound condolences the former President prayed for eternal rest to all the martyred, early recovery of those injured and patience to the bereaved families. Asif Ali Zardari also directed the Party leaders to suspend all activities and immediately mount efforts aimed at relief and rehabilitation of the victim families. He also called upon the Party workers to visit the hospitals and donate blood to those injured. On this occasion let it also be said that the whole nation stands behind the law enforcing agencies in the ongoing operation against the militants and salutes the sacrifices, courage and determination of our armed forces and the courage and resilience of the people.

Pakistan school attack: Students, teachers recount the horror they saw

By Jethro Mullen, CNN

They were in classes or taking tests. Wearing their green blazers and white shirts, some of the students sat listening to a lecture.

Then, the Taliban gunmen came, bursting through doors and firing in all directions.

The horror that followed Tuesday at the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, Pakistan, has shocked the world: 145 people dead, most of them children.

Here are accounts by students, teachers and parents of what they witnessed during those hellish hours.

THE STUDENTS

School tie as a tourniquet

Mohammed Bilal, 13, said he was taking a math test when the gunfire started.

"My thigh was burning like metal -- I fell," the seventh-grader told CNN at Peshawar's Lady Reading Hospital where he was being treated for his injuries.

But using his school tie as a tourniquet, Mohammed managed to run to the gate and escape the mayhem.

'A lot of children are under the benches -- kill them.'

Another student in the hospital, 14-year-old Ahmed Faraz, said he was in the school's auditorium when four or five people burst in through a back door and "started firing rapidly."

The ninth-grader told CNN that after a bullet hit his left shoulder, he lay under one of the benches in the room.

The militants were shouting, "God is great," as they stalked through the auditorium, according to Ahmed.

Then, he said, one of them observed that "a lot of the children are under the benches," before uttering a chilling order: "Kill them."

"My shoulder was peeking out of the bench, and somebody was following," Ahmed recalled. "They went into another room, (and when) I ran to the exit, I fell."

'I saw death so close'

Shahrukh Khan, 16, was also in the auditorium when the gunmen charged in. He gave Agence France-Presse a similar account to the one given by Ahmed. But he also described in harrowing detail his brush with death.

"I saw a pair of big black boots coming towards me, this guy was probably hunting for students hiding beneath the benches," he told the French news agency. Khan said he felt burning pain in both his legs as he was shot just below the knees.

He said he played dead, cramming his tie into his mouth so that he wouldn't scream.

"The man with big boots kept on looking for students and pumping bullets into their bodies," he told AFP. "I lay as still as I could and closed my eyes, waiting to get shot again."

"My body was shivering. I saw death so close and I will never forget the black boots approaching me -- I felt as though it was death that was approaching me."

After the men left, Khan said he tried to get up but fell to the ground because of his injuries.

"When I crawled to the next room, it was horrible. I saw the dead body of our office assistant on fire," he said. "She was sitting on the chair with blood dripping from her body as she burned."

He said he took refuge behind a door and then passed out, waking to find himself on a hospital bed.

THE TEACHERS

'I couldn't move'

Zulfiqar Ahmad, a teacher, told the BBC he was holding a math class in the school's central wing when he heard gunshots.

"There was panic in the classroom and some students rushed out to see what was going on, but they soon came rushing back in," he said. "One of them closed the door and put on the latch."

But the militants broke down the door and started shooting wildly.

"I was hit in the left arm, in the left side of my chest, and twice on my left thigh," Ahmad told the BBC. "I fell to the ground. I must have been lying there for an hour before the army soldiers came in and moved me to the hospital. I tried to turn on my right side to prevent bleeding from my arm, but I couldn't move."

He said that there were 18 students in the class and that he believes that none of them survived.

Gunmen hit rooms 'one by one'

Mudassar Abbass, a physics lab assistant at the school, described the gunmen's ruthless approach.

"The men entered into the rooms one by one and started indiscriminately firing at the staff member and students," he told AFP.

The exams and the lecture in the auditorium meant students were grouped in different parts of the school, he said.

THE PARENTS

'A second life'

Some parents who rushed to the school or the hospitals where the wounded were being treated had their worst fears allayed.

Muhammad Arshad gave a sigh of relief after soldiers rescued his son Ehsan, The New York Times reported.

"I am thankful to God for giving him a second life," he said.

'In uniform in the morning .. in a casket now'

But many others were confronted with devastating news.

"My son was in uniform in the morning. He is in a casket now," cried Tahir Ali as he came to the hospital to collect the body of his 14-year-old son, Abdullah.

"My son was my dream," Ali told The Associated Press. "My dream has been killed."

'Why did you snatch away my son?'

Irshadah Bibi, 40, whose 12-year-old son was among the dead, beat her face in grief, AFP reported.

"O God, why did you snatch away my son?" she sobbed. "What is the sin of my child and all these children?"

She was throwing herself against an ambulance at the Lady Reading Hospital, AFP said, one of many inconsolable parents.

Pakistan's 9/11

By Peter Bergen

The slaughter of more than 130 children at a school by the Pakistani Taliban on Tuesday may prove as pivotal to Pakistan's national security policy as the 9/11 attacks were for the United States.

For decades since its founding in 1947, Pakistan has conceived of its neighbor India as its main enemy. Indeed, the two countries have fought three major wars with each other as well as many smaller skirmishes.

With Tuesday's attack, it is abundantly clear to all Pakistanis that their main enemy is the internal enemy -- the Pakistani Taliban.

This realization has been a long time coming, but it has finally come because the Taliban have killed thousands of Pakistani soldiers, police and civilians over the past decade. And with Tuesday's attack the level of Pakistani outrage against the Taliban is now at unprecedented levels.

There is a widespread narrative in the United States that the Pakistani government has not done enough to counter the Taliban. That narrative is out of date. In fact there has been a sea change in how, in particular, the Pakistani military regards the Taliban, whom it once supported.

In August 2012, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, then the army chief general, gave a speech in Pakistan that didn't get much attention in the West, but it was a clear statement that the most important player in Pakistan's national security was reformulating Pakistani strategy from its overwhelmingly India-focus to the domestic threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban.

Kayani said, "We realize that the most difficult task for any army is to fight against its own people. ... The fight against extremism and terrorism is our own war and we are right in fighting it."

This policy of taking the fight to the Pakistani Taliban has been continued by the new army chief general, Raheel Sharif, who visited the United States last month, a trip that was notable for the warm reception he received in Washington and also at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, which manages the war in Afghanistan. This visit was all in stark contrast from three years ago when Pakistani-American relations were at their nadir following the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden was killed.

The principal reason for the warming U.S.-Pakistan relationship has been the large-scale operation that the Pakistani military launched beginning in June into the remote tribal region of North Waziristan along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

North Waziristan is the headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban, the notorious Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network and remnants of al Qaeda. Launching such an operationhas long been a key demand of the United States to the Pakistani military and government.

According to the Pakistani military, during the past six months, it has killed more than 1,000 militants. Among them was the death this month of Adnan Shukrijumah, akey leader of al Qaeda who grew up in New York and Florida.

From multiple sources in the Pakistani military and the U.S. government I have heard that it was the Pakistani military, not the civilian government, that was pushing hard to conduct the North Waziristan operation.

Earlier in the year, the civilian government, led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, clung to the hope -- in reality, a delusion -- that some kind of a peace deal could be struck with the Pakistani Taliban.

As Tuesday's despicable attack makes clear, the Pakistani Taliban are not a bunch of Henry Kissingers-in-waiting eager to make a deal, but rather are led by fanatical religious zealots willing to send half a dozen suicide attackers to kill scores of children. The history of negotiations with fanatical religious zealots is not an encouraging one.

Indeed, anyone with the most passing knowledge of previous "peace" deals with the Pakistan Taliban would have understood the futility of trying to make a deal with them. The Pakistani government concluded peace deals with the Taliban in 2004, 2005 and 2008. All of the deals collapsed.

Today the Pakistani military understands that the Frankenstein that it helped to create must now be killed. It will have the support of the vast majority of Pakistanis to do so.

Pakistan - Life comes to a standstill in Peshawar as country mourns school massacre

Pakistan is observing three days mourning in connection with Peshawar school tragedy that left 141 dead, including 132 students of Army Public School and College on Tuesday.

According to the Foreign Office, the national flags will be flown at half mast at all the Pakistani Consulates and High Commissions.

The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has announced to keep the schools, colleges and universitites closed across the province while the traders had also announced to keep the shops and businesses shut to observe the mourning.

Pakistan Bar Council has also announced to observe a strike today.

The educational institutions in Sindh will remain open and carry out the educational activities according to the routine. Education Minister Nisar Khoro told that special prayers will be held for the departed souls. However, the University of Karachi has cancelled all the examinations that were scheduled for today.

The government of Gilgit-Baltistan has also announced three-day mourning over the Peshawar tragedy.

In one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of Pakistan, 141 people, including 132 children, were martyred and 118 students and three staff members received injuries when militants stormed the Army Public School and College on Warsak Road here on Tuesday.

The Mullah Fazlullah-led terrorist outfit, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claimed responsibility soon after the attack. Al-Qaeda Taliban also claimed responsibility for the attack. Talking to reporters, the Al-Qaeda-Taliban commander for Mohmand and Bajaur tribal regions, Yousaf Raza Mujahid, said fighters of his group attacked the school.

Video: Sad Song for my Peshawar - Gulzar Alam- kala Mey Perzo shi pa Bamono Pekawara

Video - Kerry says "devastating" Pakistan school attack angers the world

Video - Pakistan: Hundreds mourn boy killed in Peshawar school attack

Video - Malala On Peshawar Attack

Video - Survivors Recount Pakistan School Attack

Witnesses described the scene on Tuesday in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan after at least 145 people were killed in a Taliban attack on a school.

Mehr Tarar, a former op-ed editor for Pakistan's Daily Times, captured the heartbreak of many Pakistanis in a column for Indian news portal NDTV:

Today, I feel as if I have been punched in my stomach. In my heart. And in my soul. With an iron rod. As I hear of children who were killed in an Army school in Peshawar, I feel my heart stopping.

Children were shot in the face. Children were shot in the head. Children were dragged out from under the chairs, under the tables, and shot. At point blank. Methodically. Coldly. Clinically. They – who go by the name of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan – say it is to avenge the Army operation against them in the FATA. To avenge the deaths of militants who were wreaking havoc on innocent Pakistanis in myriad acts of terror. It's retribution, they say.

I have nothing to say here. You call yourself a Muslim, you call your fight a jihad, you call your way that of Allah. And yet you do what Allah forbids you to do: to perpetrate a war in His name where you kill children. Where you kill people who have never harmed you. You are not just Pakistan's enemy but you are also your own worst enemy.

Carnage in Peshawar - A special kind of evil

It defies comprehension, the special kind of evil that fired the minds of the men who brought death to Peshawar on Monday, an evil that made them target children gathering for their morning classes and extinguish so many young lives. In days to come, all of Pakistan will mourn. Indians will share their sorrow, as parents, as siblings, and as people who have learned that the living carry with them wounds inflicted by terror.

This isn’t the first large-scale terrorist attack against children — Ingush and Chechen jihadists from the Riyadus-Salikhin killed 156 at Beslan 10 years ago this September. In Pakistan, thousands have died in bombings targeted at people who did no wrong, bar worshipping the “wrong” god, or being born the “wrong” gender, or just happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is no horror too large, it seems, for terrorists who have taught themselves to believe that god has willed them to kill. For years, Pakistan’s military establishment first patronised the jihadists who are now tearing the country apart, and then sought accommodation with them. Finding that its effort at appeasement achieved little, the army finally went to war against some jihadists in their North Waziristan strongholds. The country is now facing the storm winds the offensive stirred up.

Like all terrorist strikes, the carnage in Peshawar wasn’t mindless. The bullets carried a message for Pakistan’s people: that the army’s growing war against the hardline Tehreek-e-Taliban will bring with it unacceptable costs. For weeks now, hardline Taliban factions, some linked to al-Qaeda, have raged against what they say are large-scale human rights violations by the Pakistan army, and vowed vengeance.

The army, the terrorist commanders who ordered the attack hope to demonstrate, is incapable of defending its own, let alone civil society. In the short term, both the military and the public may respond with rage, but pressure will inevitably mount to buy peace, and that will be the Pakistan government’s acid test. In the past, these pressures have led some political forces in Pakistan to blame India for the terrorism that now afflicts the country. Hopefully, wisdom will be demonstrated now. It is time to mourn, then, but also to act. The war against religious terror in this region has only one way to go — forward. For, on either side is the abyss.

- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/a-special-kind-of-evil/#sthash.Wbkg04Y2.dpuf

Russia condemns attack on school in Peshawar

Russia on Tuesday strongly condemned the barbaric act of terrorism carried out by the terrorists at a school in Peshawar.

According to Russian embassy, the Russian Foreign Ministry while condemning the terrorist attack at school in which students were made hostages while more than 100 students and teachers, most of them children killed and dozens wounded. It condemned the barbaric act carried out by the terrorists who do not hesitate to commit senseless and cruel attacks even against children. The Russian ministry said, “We hope that masterminds and perpetrators of this inhuman act will face the punishment they deserve and we would like to extend condolences to the friends and relatives of those killed and wish a speedy recovery to the injured.”

It added, “We support the measures undertaken by the government of Pakistan aimed at the extermination of the hotbeds of terrorism. We expect Pakistan to continue with its uncompromising struggle to eliminate the extremist infrastructure. Russia is ready to proceed with assisting the Pakistani government in its efforts to fight terror.”

Pakistan responds to Peshawar school massacre with strikes on Taliban

Jon Boone in Peshawar and Ewen MacAskill

At least 141 dead – including 132 children – after attackers storm school, shoot students and fight with commandos

The Pakistan military has launched massive air strikes in its remote border region against the Taliban in retaliation for the massacre in a Peshawar school on Tuesday morning that left at least 141 dead, 132 of them children.

The attack in Peshawar was one of the most horrific incidents in the country’s troubled history of the last decade, prompting an outcry at home and abroad – mainly because so many children were killed.

The assault began on Tuesday morning when seven attackers dressed in army uniform and wearing suicide vests stormed the school, which is attended almost exclusively by the children of army personnel.

Witnesses described the attackers shooting students at random and taking others hostage. Firefights with Pakistan commandos continued for four to five hours before the school was cleared and the last of the attackers killed. Pakistan’s major general, Asim Salim, said 960 students and staff were rescued.

The Pakistan Taliban, Tehreek-e-Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in revenge for a ferocious army offensive – named Zarb-e-Azb - that has been underway in tribal areas since June.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. “We want them to feel the pain.”

Pakistan’s army chief of staff, General Raheel Shariff, said in a tweet that “massive air strikes” had been carried out in the Khyber region as the school was being cleared of attackers.

Before leaving the capital of Islamabad for Peshawar, which is close to the Afghanistan border and has long had a reputation for lawlessness and terrorist incidents, Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, described the massacre as “a national tragedy”.

He added: “The government together with the army has started Zarb-e-Azb and it will continue until the terrorism is rooted out from our land.”

Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly the North-West Frontier, have seen many terrorist incidents, often occurring out of sight of the media.

But the Peshawar massacre has seen regional rivals join to express sympathy and support for the victims. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, described the attack as cowardly, adding: “It is a senseless act of unspeakable brutality that has claimed lives of the most innocent of human beings – young children in their school.”

The president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who is engaged in a struggle with the Afghanistan Taliban, also condemned the massacre, saying “the killing of innocent children is contrary to Islam”.

The Nobel Peace prize-winner, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban two years ago for speaking out in favour of education for girls, said the Peshawar attack had left her heartbroken.

“Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this.”

Hundreds of students were in the school when the attack began mid-morning, between 10 and 11am local time. Salim said the attacks used a ladder to cross the school walls from a graveyard behind the school.

Ali Khan, a local police official, said: “One of them blew himself up as soon as the guards came to capture them. The others started moving towards classes and the principal’s room.

“This is an upper middle-class area and most of the children belong to army families.”

A student who was in the school at the time of the attack told local media: “The gunmen entered class by class and shot some kids one by one.”

Commandos arrived at the scene soon after the shooting began. Military helicopter gunships hovered above but were unable to open fire for fear of hitting the hostages.

Fighting continued for more than five hours after the attack began. Police were struggling to hold back distraught parents trying to break through a cordon to reach the school when there were three loud explosions after 3.30pm.

A police official in Peshawar told the Guardian that 104 children had been killed and 100 injured. “Some of the injured are critical so the death toll could rise,” he said. Later, Salim, the Pakistani general, said that 141 had died – 132 children and nine members of staff.

Dr Abdul Wahab, head of the emergency department at Lady Reading hospital, which made an appeal for blood, said 26 bodies had been brought in, most of them children, and about 100 injured, again mostly children, wounded by bullets or shrapnel.

Wounded student Abdullah Jamal told the Associated Press he was getting first-aid instructions and training with a team of Pakistani army medics when the attack began.

Jamal, who was shot in the leg, said no one knew what was going on in the first few seconds. “Then I saw children falling down who were crying and screaming. I also fell down. I learned later that I have got a bullet,” he said, speaking from his hospital bed.

Waqar-Ullah Khattack, one of four invigilators at an exam for 61 students aged 14-16 in the school, said he and his colleagues told the students to get down on the floor as soon as they heard firing from an AK-47 and blasts from grenades.

Given the number of terror attacks in the city, he said they had been trained for such an eventuality. Less than an hour after hitting the floor, they were led to safety by commandos, walking past the bodies of at least seven children.

“I have no words for this type of terrorism because we are all just too mentally upset,” Khattack said.

Mudassar Abbas, a physics laboratory assistant at the school, said some students were having a celebration party when the attack began.

“I saw six or seven people walking class to class and opening fire on children,” he said.

A student who survived the attack said soldiers came to rescue students during a lull in the firing.

“When we were coming out of the class we saw dead bodies of our friends lying in the corridors. They were bleeding. Some were shot three times, some four times,” the student said.

“The men entered the rooms one by one and started indiscriminate firing at the staff and students.”

Tehreek-e-Taliban is allied to the Afghanistan Taliban, sharing similar aims regarding the establishment of sharia law and opposition to the US but, unlike the Afghanistan Taliban, regards the Pakistan government as a target.

The Pakistan army has been carrying out a major offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, home to Tehreek-e-Taliban, since June, after an attack on the international airport in Karachi. Hundreds have been killed in the FATA and tens of thousands displaced.

Video Report - Global condemnation after Taliban massacre at Pakistan school

UN chief condemns Peshawar school attack as ‘act of horror’

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned on Tuesday a Taliban attack on a Pakistani school that left at least 141 dead, most of them students.

“It is an act of horror and rank cowardice to attack defenseless children while they learn,” Ban said at the start of a UN Security Council meeting.

“The hearts of the world go out to the parents and families who have lost loved ones.”

Taliban insurgents stormed the army-run school in Peshawar on Tuesday, going from classroom to classroom shooting children, some as young as 12, in one of Pakistan's bloodiest ever attacks.

Speaking in a solemn tone, Ban began his address to a council meeting on peacekeeping with the statement condemning what he termed the “blood-curdling attack” in Pakistan.

“I condemn this heinous attack in the strongest possible terms,” he said.

“No cause can justify such brutality. No grievance can excuse such horror. Schools must be safe and secure learning spaces. Getting an education is every child's right. Going to school should not be an act of bravery.”

Ban expressed UN support for the Pakistani government's efforts to fight terrorism and extremism, and urged Islamabad to make every effort to track down those responsible for the carnage.

The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it revenge for a major military offensive in the region.

TTP spokesman Muhammad Khorasani said Tuesday's assault was carried out to avenge Taliban fighters and their families killed in the army's offensive against militant strongholds in North Waziristan. The military has hailed the operation as a major success in disrupting the TTP's insurgency.