Peshawar school attack: Pak Taliban killing children; when will this stop?

Jihadi terrorists appear to be in a free fall down a bottomless pit and there seem to be no moral or ethical barriers to their calamitous descent into brutalism. Just when you thought that abduction and brutal beheading of innocent civilians was the final frontier of barbaric terror and that is where they will stop, terrorists have moved on to the unthinkable: killing innocent children of their own faith and countrymen. [caption id=“attachment_1852673” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Pakistani men carry an injured school girl to a hospital following an attack by Taliban gunmen on a school in Peshawar. AFP[/caption] Their explanation for the inhuman act is equally revolting. The Tehreek-i-Taliban that claimed responsibility for the attack said the children — students of an army school — were targeted to make their parents feel the pain of the sufferings of the people affected by Zarz-e-Azb, Pakistan army’s operation to flush out Taliban from North Waziristan. Even among the few incidents of terror where innocent, unarmed children were targeted, the Taliban attack has no parallel. In September 2004, militants had attacked a school in Beslan, a city in Russia, killing 330 people, most of them children. But even this heinous crime was perpetrated by militants linked to separatist insurgency in the nearby republic of Chechnya. But the Talibanis of Pakistan have gone a step further; they have attacked their own future generation. According to Geo TV, there might be yet another reason for the massacre of these innocent children and taking several others hostage. The Taliban, according to the Pakistan-based channel, says they were protesting against the Nobel Committee’s decision to select Malala Yousafzai for this year’s peace prize. The Taliban have tried to kill Malala — a young, harmless messenger of education for girls — in the past too. But inflicting collateral damage on so many schoolgoing children in their war against an unarmed girl suggests new depths of desperation and moral decline, all in the name of religion. While accepting her prize, Malala had said she learnt two words from the first two chapters of the Holy Quran: Iqra (read) and nun-wal-qalam (by the pen). “One child, one teacher, one teacher and one book can change the world,” Malala had said. Terrorists have shown they don’t go to school to armed with pen or to read, and have their own ways of changing the world. Where will all this stop? Or, will it? There doesn’t seem to be much hope in sight. Tuesday’s incident in Pakistan and the one before that in Sydney, when a self-proclaimed ISIS follower held several people at gun-point in a café, underlines a new, dangerous trend in jihadist philosophy. There appears to be no moral beacon left for them, no leadership to tell them where to draw the line. Soon after the attack in Peshawar, a grieving parent was wailing on Duniya TV channel, ‘Itne chhote bachchon ko koi maarta hai? Khuda ka waasta hai yaar, koi sunane wala bhi hai Pakistan mein?’ The terrifying news is that not just in Pakistan but in most of the Islamic countries, nobody is willing to listen to their political leadership; in most of these places there is a violent political struggle to control the reins of power, depriving politicians of their legitimacy. There is nobody — no politician, no religious leader — to stand up with conviction and courage and call for the end of this internecine, insane war. Most of the financiers of the terror outfits are from Saudi Arabia and the rich Emirates. There is a school of thought that suggests that they have the financial authority to speak up. But these influential countries too seem to be content in the feeling that these ruinous wars are being fought far away from their land and, thus, there is no pressing need to speak out against such incidents. Terror outfits have stepped into this vacuum, taking control of both the temporal and religious leadership. They seem to be on a roll at the moment, outdoing each other in brutality and inhumanity; drawing new converts — many of them self-radicalised — without even bothering to send out their recruiters or proselytising forces. Only a rare optimist would predict that the free-falling jihadists would stop at attacking innocent children or waging war against a young girl. Ghalib once poignantly said, Koi umeed bar nahin aati, koi surat nazar nahin aati. But he also warned, Kaba kis moonh se jaoge Ghalib, Sharm tum ko magar nahin aati.