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In Pakistan, at Least 22 Dead in Attack at Bacha Khan University In Pakistan, at Least 22 Dead in Attack at Bacha Khan University
(about 2 hours later)
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — At least 22 people were killed and many more wounded when militants attacked a university campus in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, a police official said. CAIRO — Taliban attackers stormed across a university campus in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, gunning down students and teachers as others leapt from classroom windows, in an assault that revived traumatic memories of an attack at a nearby school in Peshawar just over a year ago.
A leader of the Pakistani Taliban said the group claimed responsibility for the attack, among the most brazen in a long insurgency it has waged against the authorities here that has targeted educational institutions in particular. The attack renewed worries about the strength of an insurgency that many Pakistanis had hoped was finally waning after an extended military crackdown on militants.
The site of Wednesday’s assault, Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, was just 25 miles from a school in Peshawar where the Pakistani Taliban killed 145 people, most of them children, in 2014. Two years earlier, the group shot Malala Yousafzai, the teenage activist for girls’ rights and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate. At least 22 people were killed in the attack, at Bacha Khan University in the northwestern town of Charsadda. Just before 9 a.m., at least four heavily armed militants, using winter fog as cover, slipped through nearby fields and scaled the rear wall of the university. Gunfire and explosions rang out across the campus as the attackers, some apparently teenagers themselves, stormed through classrooms and dormitories shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and firing at random.
The Taliban have been weakened recently in Pakistan after the military launched an offensive in their main haven of North Waziristan, but the attack and a suicide bombing on Tuesday that killed 11 people together showed that they were still a dangerous force. Witnesses described scenes of carnage as the gunmen sprayed bullets at students, some of whom leapt through windows while others cowered behind their desks. Many staff members locked themselves in their offices. But one junior chemistry lecturer, who was armed with a pistol, returned fire. Witnesses said his actions helped several students escape before he, too, was killed.
Under a heavy fog on Wednesday, gunmen scaled the rear walls of the university around 9 a.m., firing into the air, witnesses said. The assault ended when the police, after engaging the militants in an hourslong gun battle, cornered them in two university blocks. They were killed before they could explode their suicide vests, officials said.
Security forces killed the attackers before they could detonate suicide vests, said Saeed Wazir, the Charsadda police chief. Violence against students is a hallmark of Islamist movements across the world, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to the Afghan Taliban, but those resonances have been particularly strong in Pakistan in recent years.
The dead included students, a senior faculty member and four guards, said Fakhr-i-Alam, a senior government official. At least 19 people were wounded. A Pakistani military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa, said that at least four attackers had been killed in exchanges of fire with the security forces. A Taliban attempt on the life of the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012 turned her into a global icon of courage. And a 2014 Taliban massacre at the Peshawar Army Public School, barely 20 miles from the scene of Wednesday’s attack, killed 150 people, mostly young students, and caused a national revulsion now considered as a turning point in the country’s fight against Taliban militants.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, condemned the attack. “We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland,” he said in a statement from Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum. “The countless sacrifices made by our countrymen will not go in vain, inshallah.” The assault in Peshawar largely galvanized previously fragmented public opinion about how to deal with jihadist militancy. And it set the conditions for a harsh army crackdown on the group that has seen over 300 prisoners hanged over the past year, some under a new network of military courts. Since then, Taliban attacks in Pakistan have been rare, after years of striking widespread terror in wave after wave of bombings and assaults.
Raza Mohammed Khan, deputy superintendent of the police in Charsadda, said that all four attackers had been killed and that no more militants remained inside the university. Some militants, however, remain undeterred. In a phone interview, Khalifa Omar Mansoor, the commander of a Taliban faction that orchestrated the Peshawar attack, said he also ordered the bloodshed in Charsadda on Wednesday.
“Bomb disposal people are on the spot defusing suicide vests,” Mr. Fakhr-i-Alam said. “The operation is over; clearance and search is on.” Mr. Mansoor, who commands a faction based in a nearby tribal district, described the violence as retribution for the army’s harsh crackdown over the past year, calling it a “lesson to the military leadership of Pakistan.”
Khalifa Umar Mansoor, a Pakistani Taliban leader, called reporters in Peshawar to claim responsibility for the attack and to say that four of their men were involved. He said the assault was in response for the execution in December of four men convicted of aiding the 2014 Peshawar school attackers. He released a photo that showed him sitting with four armed men, mostly teenagers, that he described as the attackers — a surreal image that juxtaposed the five militants against a beautiful vista of verdant meadows and mountain peaks.
An official at Bacha Khan University said that when she and her colleagues realized they were under attack, they locked the door of their office, turned off the lights and lay on the floor. “The university has its own security staff, but it’s not adequate enough to face the well-armed and -trained Taliban,” said the official, Salma Khan. But Pakistan’s main Taliban group quickly distanced itself from the violence. In a statement, a spokesman for the Tehrik-e-Taliban — which despite years of internal conflict and splintering still claims to represent the country’s main Taliban factions, including Mr. Mansoor’s — threatened to bring its organizers before a Shariah court.
She said many of the students were killed in their dormitories. “Our resolve of educating our children cannot be shaken by such cowardly acts,” she said. “Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan condemns this un-Islamic act in strongest terms and disassociates itself from this entirely,” the spokesman said.
Sajjad Ahmed, a professor of sociology and gender studies, said he saw the attackers shoot a dozen students. “I will not forget this terrible scene for rest of my life,” he said. “Students were falling like someone was cutting down newly blossomed flowers.” The attack also had an unmistakable political dimension for its targeting of peaceful political elements inside ethnic Pashtun society.
Kasib Jan, a student, told ARY TV that he had seen four or five gunmen with black turbans shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” The Charsadda university is named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a celebrated pre-independence leader known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for his advocacy of nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. The political party that carries Khan’s legacy, the Awami National Party, suffered huge political losses in 2013 after a concerted Taliban campaign of violence against its supporters and candidates in northwestern Pakistan and the southern port city of Karachi before the last general election.
“They were firing all around,” he said. “University security guards first engaged them, but it was beyond their capacities. We hid behind the benches in the classrooms. We heard them walking around, but they moved away. We came out and ran away to safety.” Wednesday’s assault occurred on the anniversary of Mr. Ghaffar Khan’s death, and hours before the university was due to host a poetry recital in his honor to which hundreds of guests had been invited.
He said that Wednesday was an exam day and that a peace concert had also been scheduled, so the campus was filled with students. Officials said 2,500 students and staff members were at the school during the attack. Sajjad Ahmed, a professor of sociology and gender studies, said he was sitting in his office when he heard the first shots, then saw a young attacker shouting “Allahu akbar” and running toward the student dormitories. He said he saw several people being shot dead.
Bacha Khan University was founded in 2012 and named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun activist who advocated nonviolent means to resist British rule in South Asia. Wednesday was the 28th anniversary of the death of Mr. Ghaffar Khan, who was described as “the frontier Gandhi.” “I will not forget this terrible scene for the rest of my life,” he said in a phone interview. “Students fell as if they were newly blossomed flowers.”
A graduate student at a local hospital, being treated for a gunshot wound, told ARY TV that he could not see much of the attack because of the fog. As the shooting erupted, staff at the university administration block locked themselves in their offices, switched off the lights and lay on the floor, said Salma Khan, a university official. “We have some security staff, but they were not enough to face the Taliban,” she said.
Peshawar and the surrounding region have faced repeated attacks in recent years. The December 2014 attack by seven Pakistani Taliban gunmen on a military-run school in Peshawar was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history and provoked a broad crackdown on militants in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Others praised the actions of Syed Hamid Hussain, the chemistry teacher who tried to hold off the rampaging gunmen with his pistol. Teachers and lecturers in northwestern Pakistan have been allowed to carry weapons since the 2014 Peshawar school attack. After firing off a few shots, he, too, was killed.
A Taliban attack on a Pakistani Air Force base near Peshawar killed 30 people in September. In the assault on Tuesday, a Taliban suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed 11 people at a police checkpoint in Peshawar. “They fired directly at the professor,” a sociology student named Muhammad Daud told Agence France-Presse, describing Mr. Hussain as “a real gentleman and a respectable teacher.”
Once the attack was over, the army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, visited the stricken campus, and also visited wounded people at a nearby hospital. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was in Switzerland attending the World Economic Forum, vowed to step up the fight against the Taliban.
“We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland,” Mr. Sharif said in a statement.
The Taliban’s rationale for attacking a school, other than it presented a relatively soft target, was not entirely clear. While attacks on army bases, five-star hotels and political leaders once appeared to cow Pakistanis, particularly in the early years after the insurgency erupted 2007, the Peshawar massacre in 2014 outraged much of the country’s leadership and public.
Arguments about the merits of negotiating with the Taliban instead of fighting them were quickly brushed aside as much of the country’s political class threw its weight behind a harsh military and judicial campaign.
Taliban violence diminished as the authorities closed radical madrassas and carried out assaults on militant hide-outs in the tribal areas. Many militants were quickly hanged under a new military judicial system that has drawn heavy criticism from human rights groups.
Still, the military continues to turn a blind eye to certain militant groups, particularly those that target India. And while the wider Taliban movement appears weak and divided, some factions have in recent weeks renewed their violent campaign against targets in the main regional city, Peshawar. On Tuesday, a Taliban suicide bombing at a police check post in the city killed 11 people.