Slaughter of innocent children at Peshawar school stuns Pakistan

People attend the funeral of a student killed in Tuesday's Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar.

AFTER the horror of the hostage siege in Sydney’s Martin Place, nothing should surprise us about the depravity of those committing acts of violence in the name of ­Islamic jihad.

But the Pakistan Taliban’s slaughter of at least 132 schoolchildren and nine teachers — some by shooting, others by having their heads severed or by being burned alive — at Peshawar’s Army Public School has shocked those familiar with the worst extremism.

This was a targeted attack not on a military installation or a police station, but on a leading, well-run school packed with teenagers and teachers.

In the seven-year war it has waged to take over a country with one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals, the Pakistan Taliban has often resorted to horror.

It was responsible for the Oct­ober 2012 gun attack on Malala Yousafzai for her campaign to stop the jihadists closing girls’ schools.

The group has shut down more than 1500 schools in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the province of which Peshawar is the capital. Thousands more across the country have been targeted.

Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies director Abdullah Khan said the massacre in Peshawar was the first attack “which carries the signature of the (even more extreme) Islamic State (influence)”.

Taliban attacks have usually taken place at night when the schools were empty — the jihadists seemed to want to avoid mass casualties.

No more: with the same sort of ruthlessness shown by the Ingush and Chechen Islamic terrorists in their assault on the school at Bes­lan, Russia, in 2004, which led to the deaths of 385 people, the Pakistan Taliban were hellbent on killing as many kids as possible in Peshawar.

At Beslan, the intention was to take hostages to force Moscow’s hand in negotiations. In Peshawar, even that dubious rationale didn’t exist. There was no intention to take hostages.

Taliban spokesman Muhammad Khurasani explained the school was targeted because it caters to the sons and daughters of army personnel — though many children from non-military families are also enrolled.

“Our shura (ruling council) decided to target these enemies of Islam right in their homes so they can feel the pain of losing their children,” he said.

Seven jihadists — heavily armed, all wearing suicide bomb vests, and some speaking in Arabic, rather than the local Pashto — climbed the back wall of the school in daylight and, after initially attacking an auditorium where a first aid class was taking place, set about killing the children. Scores were cut down by automatic gunfire from Kalashnikov assault ­rifles.

Others had their throats slit or were beheaded. Some were set alight.

The battle lasted for hours as units of the crack Pakistan Special Services Group fought to gain control of the campus. Cornered jihadists detonated their suicide vests. All the attackers were reported dead.

The rationale, according to Taliban sources, lies in theoffensive by the Pakistan since August in nearby Waziristan against the insurgents.

Some see the decision to attack the sons and daughters of military personnel as a sign that the offensive is having an impact.

What cannot be ignored is the that the Pakistan Taliban, like Islamic extremists elsewhere, is preoccupied by its aim of preventing children, especially girls, being educated. More than half of Pakistan’s 188 million people are illiterate. They desperately needs schools, yet Western education, in the view of the Islamic jihadists, is an offence to Islam.

The Pakistan Taliban is not alone in this madness. In the West African nation of Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, jihadists of the Boko Haram movement, whose name means “Western education is forbidden”, maintain that schools are “a plot against Islam”.

Hundreds of schools have been forced to closed as Boko Haram kills and kidnaps girls. The movement’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, has declared that “schools will be targeted until our last breath ... teachers who teach education ... we will kill them, we will kill them in front of their students and tell the students henceforth to study the Koran”.

For Pakistan, the attack on the school in the fabled “city of flowers” comes at a desperately dangerous and difficult time, with its political and military leadership more divided than ever over how to deal with the Taliban, with indications that there has been little change to Islamabad’s self-defeating and misguided double-dealing with the jihadists.

Even opposition leader and former cricketer Imran Khan, who has in the past favoured talks with the Taliban, condemned the ­attack yesterday.

Important as Afghanistan has been to the global battle against terrorism, Pakistan, ­because of its nuclear arsenal and the target it represents for the global jihadist movement, is even more so.

Just as all the signs in Afghanistan, as the bulk of US-led Western forces withdraw, suggest the Taliban remains as potent as it has ever been, so, too, in Pakistan are there indications that despite the long-awaited push by the army into Waziristan, an al-Qa’ida and Taliban stronghold, the jihadists are gaining ground.

The massacre of children, while it will evoke revulsion throughout the country, will also be seen as an escalation in the ­terrorists’ ­strategy to spread fear in a nation deeply troubled by ­extremism.

However, the country is not without hope.

It is best summed up by Malala, who, despite all she has been through, said after she learned of the Peshawar atrocity: “I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brother and sisters — but we will never be defeated.”

If only Pakistan’s political and military leadership showed similar resolution, the crisis represented by the advance of Islamic ­terrorism in a country of such importance to the global battle against the jihadists would be less daunting.