A student injured in the shootout at a school under attack by Taliban
gunmen is rushed to a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Dec. 16, 2014.
Three suspects have been killed and as many as five remain inside the building after they gained access by dressing up as paramilitary soldiers, Pervez Khattak, chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told reporters. Some 250 people are being held hostage after as many as 1,500 were earlier captured, according to Feroze Shah, a spokesman in Peshawar.
“The army has taken up positions all around the school and will be going on the offensive soon,” Shah said by phone from the site of the attack, adding that the dead were
mostly high school students who died when one of the attackers blew himself up. Pakistan’s GEO TV reported that gunshots could be heard inside the school.
The attack is the biggest terrorist strike since Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif backed an army offensive earlier this year into a Taliban stronghold near the Afghan border. Terrorism has killed more than 50,000 people in Pakistan since 2001 and complicated efforts to revive South Asia’s second-biggest economy.
Today’s strike is the deadliest attack on a school since a 2004 assault by Islamic militants in Russia, according to Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. Some 350 people died then in Beslan, North Ossetia, half of them children.
Army troops arrive at a school under attack by militants in Peshawar today.
Hostage Trend
“Due to the momentum of events in Syria and Iraq, the number of groups in Pakistan have become more galvanized,” Gunaratna said. “You can see a trend toward hostage taking and barricade-type situations. It’s a very serious situation.”Nawaz Sharif and Army Chief Raheel Sharif both flew to the site of the attack today, according to news reports. About 400 students were rescued, Najeedullah Khan, a police official, said by phone earlier.
Television images showed armored vehicles rolling into the area near the school building as soldiers leaped out of vans. Mothers were shown running toward the gate of the school and crying inside the hospital.
Pakistan’s military started a ground offensive in June to flush out militants from North Waziristan, a tribal region on the Afghanistan border the U.S. has called the “epicenter” of terrorism. That came after successive Taliban attacks on a Pakistan International Airlines Corp. flight and Karachi’s international airport.
Taliban Militants
After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, North Waziristan became a safe haven for foreign militants like Uzbeks and Turks who fought alongside the fallen Taliban regime. In 2007, militant groups in the area united to form the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which went on an offensive toward Islamabad.After Pakistan’s army flushed them out of the Swat valley and most tribal regions, it resisted U.S. pressure to follow through with a push into North Waziristan, which was also home to the Haqqani network and Gul Bahadur, who were fighting American troops in Afghanistan.
Unable to convince Pakistan to take action, the Obama administration intensified its campaign of drone attacks that President George W. Bush started in 2004.
‘Desperate Attempt’
Nawaz Sharif told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month that militants were cleared from 80 percent of North Waziristan, state-run Pakistan Radio reported. He called on the international community to better recognize Pakistan’s anti-terrorism efforts.Schools are frequent targets for Taliban militants, according to Rashid Ahmad Khan, a professor of international relations at the University of Sargodha in Punjab province.
“This is blowback from the militant side amid the ongoing army operation in North Waziristan,” Khan said by phone. “It’s a reaction. It’s a desperate attempt from the militants to embarrass the government.”
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