Attack on Charsadda University in 2016

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At least 21 people died and 50 people were injured in the attack on Bacha Khan University on January 20, 2016 . Terrorists entered the campus and buildings shortly after Charsadda University opened in northwestern Pakistan , shot and threw explosive devices. The Pakistani al-Qaeda offshoot Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) took responsibility for the attack, but another Taliban group rejected responsibility.

environment

The attack is related to the ongoing conflict in northwest Pakistan . This part of the country is used by the Taliban as a retreat for missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban had carried out several attacks against educational institutions in the neighboring Swat Valley in the 2000s and took control of the area from October 2007 to May 2009. After a counter-offensive by the Pakistani army, there were numerous waves of refugees. Malala Yousafzai , an internet activist from the Swat Valley, who was deliberately attacked and critically injured by the Taliban in 2012 at the age of 15, became known and honored worldwide . Taliban fighters had an attack in 2014 in Peshawarmurdered more than 150 people at a school run by the Pakistani military. 136 of them were children. The Pakistani military then stepped up its operations against the Islamists in the north of the country.

The Awami National Party , closely associated with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan , who gave the university its name, was then the target of acts of retaliation. She rules the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region . His grandson, the party leader Asfandyar Wali Khan narrowly escaped a suicide attack, and a minister, Bashir Ahmad Bilour, was murdered. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a Pashtun freedom fighter and companion of Gandhi in his non-violent protest against British rule. The university, founded in 2012, has around 3,000 students .

attack

Charsada is around 35 kilometers away from the regional capital Peshawar . There were more people at the university that day than usual, as the 28th anniversary of the death of the namesake Bacha Khan was honored with a poetry lecture, among other things.

On the morning of January 20, 2016, at around 9:30 a.m. local time, several armed terrorists entered the campus and broke into buildings. They shot around with automatic weapons. Most of the victims were students in a male dormitory, Pakistani police reported. The access to the campus was cordoned off by the police and the campus was stormed by the army and police. The four attackers were shot dead by the security forces. One of the lecturers, a chemist named Sayed Hamid Hussein according to media reports, opened fire on the attackers with a pistol. He himself was shot, but his resistance enabled a number of students to escape.

Omar Mansoor, the spokesman for the Taliban group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) from the Peshawar region, called various media houses at noon on January 20, 2016, according to local journalists, saying that the Taliban were responsible for the attack. The attack was an act of revenge for the comrades killed by the Pakistani military in 2015 . The Taliban attacked a university "so that people don't say again: We kill children", referring to the above-mentioned brutal and devastating 2014 attack on a school in Peshawar .

The official spokesman for the Taliban, Muhammad Khorasani, denied confession.

Reactions and assessments

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in a first reaction: "We are willing and determined to keep our promise to eradicate the epidemic of terrorism in our home country."

Political scientist Boris Wilke from Bielefeld University told Deutschlandradio Kultur that the attack was about an action against the Pakistani army. Since mid-June 2015, the army has been conducting "a large-scale and apparently quite successful military operation in North Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan, targeting the Taliban, that is, the very same terrorist group that carried out this attack". It should also be noted that the Taliban in Pakistan are not a closed group and that there is competition between different groups for the claim to leadership. "The violence of the attack and its symbolic power, its symbolic effect can also be seen against the background of this competition within the umbrella organization," said Wilke.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FR: 21 dead after attack on university, sighted on January 20, 2016 21 dead after attack on university
  2. ↑ Der Standard, viewed January 20, 2016 [1]
  3. ^ Brendan O'Malley: Education under attack - 2010 . UNESCO , 2010, ISBN 92-3104155-X .
  4. ↑ Peter Bergen, Katherine Tiedemann: Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion . Oxford University Press , December 11, 2012, ISBN 0-19-998677-0 , p. 306.
  5. ↑ Annyssa Bellal: The War Report: Armed Conflict in 2014 . Oxford University Press , December 10, 2015, ISBN 0-19-107862-X , p. 224.
  6. ^ Imtiaz Gul: The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier . Penguin, June 10, 2010, ISBN 1-101-43476-7 .
  7. ↑ a b c Pakistan attack: Gunmen kill 19 at Bacha Khan University - BBC News. In: BBC News. Retrieved January 23, 2016 (UK English).
  8. ↑ Spiegel-online, viewed on January 20, 2016 [2]
  9. ↑ Quote from tagesschau.de. sighted January 20, 2016 [3]
  10. ↑ Die Zeit: Armed men storm university campus in Pakistan, sighted Jan 21, 2016 [4]
  11. ↑ Quoted from BBC: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said: “We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland.” Viewed January 20, 2016 [5]
  12. ↑ DRKultur: "Rejection and Disgust" in Pakistan, viewed Jan 21, 2016 [6]