In what is being described as one the deadliest attacks Pakistan has ever seen, 126 have been reported killed in a Taliban offensive on a school in Peshawar on Tuesday morning. More than 100 of the dead are students.
The Pakistani military traded heavy gunfire with Taliban forces for hours, the siege punctuated by three suicide bombs. From the New York Times:
The siege started Tuesday morning around 10 a.m. when at least five to six heavily armed Taliban gunmen entered Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. According to initial reports, the gunmen opened fire on students and have taken dozens of them as hostages. Some students managed to escape the school compound, the local news media reported.
The gunmen entered after scaling a wall at the rear of the main school building. They opened fire and took dozens of students hostage in the main auditorium of the building, the news media reported.
"We thought it must be the children playing some game," Mudassir Awan, who works at the school, told Reuters. "But then we saw a lot of firearms with them." Most of the school's student were children of Pakistani military personnel.
A representative for Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, the Times reports, carried out in retaliation for a Pakistani military raid of the militant's North Waziristan tribal hideouts. From the Washington Post:
In June, Pakistan's army launched a major operation against Islamic militants in the country's restive tribal areas. Since then, the number of attacks inside the country have sharply declined, but the Pakistani Taliban had been warning for months that it would retaliate.
"We selected the army's school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females," Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani told reporters. "We want them to feel the pain."
According to the BBC, five of the Taliban militants have been killed.
[ Image via AP]
