[Students began trickling back to schools in Pakistan Bacha Khan University
By Annie Gowen
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A Pakistani police commando takes part in a security drill at a
school in
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Zeeshan Jehangir, 14, and his
two best friends were not among them. The three — dressed in maroon-and-gray
school uniforms — huddled on the stairs and planned out how it would be when
the gunmen came for them.
Which part of the school wall
could they scale the fastest? Where could they hide? Should they pool their
pocket money and buy a pistol? They were planning for every eventuality,
Jehangir said.
“Which place is safe? The
threat is everywhere, school and home,” said Umair Iqbal, 13. “We sit in the
back seats of our class. Nobody wants to sit in the front rows, because they
will be the first killed.”
Students began trickling back
to schools in Pakistan Bacha Khan University
But anxiety among parents and
children throughout Pakistan
“Those who were threatening
kids from going to school will be defeated,” he said.
Yet panicked parents, some who
have continued to keep their children at home, said they had little faith that
the government could protect them at school. The scale of the security needs is
daunting — the province where the attacks occurred has more than 27,000 schools
and 200 colleges and universities.
“Where is the government and
where are our security agencies?” asked Sohail Nasir, 51, a doctor and father.
“It seems it’s a matter of choice for terrorist organizations. They decide when
to strike, take their time and then strike successfully again, and our security
organizations can’t do anything about that.”
The Pakistani Taliban — an
offshoot of the terrorist group waging insurgency in Afghanistan — has
destroyed an estimated 1,500 schools in Pakistan since 2001, according to
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a national security expert and physics professor at Forman
Christian College in Lahore. The group believes thateducation in
the public schools is contrary to Islam and that the only education that
is needed is in madrassas, religious schools, he said.
“They say this is where
apostasy is nurtured. In that sense they’re not that much different from [the
Islamic State],” Hoodbhoy said.
Militants in the same province
shot a young girl in the head and neck as she sat waiting in a school bus in
2012. Malala Yousafzai survived and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in
2014.
The most recent attacks have
disrupted learning in a country where educational attainment remains “dismally
low,” according to a 2014 report from the Ministry of Education. One third of
children — about 7 million — do not attend school at all, and
42 percent of the country is illiterate, the report said.
The two school attacks have
raised questions about the efficacy of the government’s military campaign against Taliban and al-Qaeda
insurgents in the country’s northwestern tribal belt, which has scattered
militants and pushed them over the border into Afghanistan
After the December 2014 attack
on the Army Public School in Peshawar, where nearly 150 students and teachers
were killed, government officials and police urged schools to build walls, add
armed guards and even train teachers to shoot, sparking a debate similar to the
discussion of arming educators in the United States.
Students said a pistol-wielding
chemistry teacher at Bacha Khan University
“Those guys will come along
with machine guns, and there’s absolutely no use. It militarizes the school
environment and puts everything under a cloud of fear,” Hoodbhoy said. To fight
extremism, he said, the government must strike at the root of the problem and
put in place “strict restrictions on the madrassas and mullahs and their
apologists in society and in the press.”
Faisal Mushtaq runs a chain of private schools with 50 campuses and 24,000
students across the country. In the past year, he has installed a security
system with armed guards, metal detectors and a biometric turnstile that
identifies students by their fingerprint and sends a text to parents when the
child enters. Male teachers have mandatory firearms training.
“We as teachers used to carry
pens; now we have to learn how to fire guns,” Mushtaq said. “We have to get
used to it because the enemy of the state has realized the weakness of society
and that is the young child.”
On Monday, after a breakfast of
toast and jam, Jehangir returned to school for the first time since the
university attack. He carried a mobile phone, a gift from his anxious parents.
The campus with about 1,000
students was abuzz with activity. Security guards searched cars. Police with
AK-47 assault rifles sat in watchtowers on the roof. Morning assembly had been
canceled.
His classmates were ready with
mordant jokes. Was one boy’s down vest a suicide jacket? How many explosives
were students carrying in their overloaded backpacks?
The sight of a police van
unnerved him.
“I fear the worst that could
happen,” Jehangir said.
Since the Army Public School
“The violent scenes of the
schoolchildren were always in front of my eyes,” he said. “I couldn’t get my
mind out of those scenes for weeks.”
On Jan. 20, when fresh
attackers descended on nearby Bacha Khan University
Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar Islamabad
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