The entrance to Bacha Khan University is guarded by a towering wall capped by sturdy steel spikes and a bunker-like guard house where all visitors are thoroughly frisked.
The four Taliban gunmen who inflicted a painful reminder on Pakistan that its “war on terror” is far from over chose the barely defended back wall to gain access to the sprawling campus in the rural outskirts of Charsadda.
The ordeal came just over a year since the country vowed to end terrorism following the Taliban massacre of 130 pupils at an army-run school in Peshawar, just 20 miles away.
Even if anyone had been watching over the fields of sugar cane, it is doubtful the four heavily armed men would have been spotted through a thick winter fog shrouding the outskirts of Charsadda on Wednesday morning.
One of the generously spaced strands of barbed wire on top of the wall was easily severed. The others appeared to have been simply pushed away, leaving just a scrap of torn black cloth behind.
Arshad Bangash, a sociology professor, tells of the exact moment the gunmen dropped into the campus just feet away from where he was having a family breakfast in his small house.
“I heard their first shout of Allahu Akbar at 8.49 exactly,” he said. “The first shot was at 8.51.”
For the following three hours Bangash would remain locked in his ground floor bedroom with his wife and two children, listening to the crackle of gunfire and occasional blasts echo around the manicured campus.
One target was a nearby guesthouse, which at least one of the gunmen appears to have reached by climbing through another flimsy barrier of barbed wire and into a neatly tended garden.
Most of the doors inside the bungalow were kicked in, presumably after their occupants locked themselves inside. It is not known if anyone was killed there, but a thick pool of blood on the carpet near the porch was still wet hours after the attack.
University buses, parked near where the intruders entered, also showed signs of fighting. One stood on flat tyres, its side pocked with bullet marks.
But the most damage was in the two hostels where hundreds of male students at the co-educational university live in shared rooms of five.
Survivors who locked themselves in said the gunmen attempted to gain access to their rooms by knocking on the doors and claiming to be police.
Some credited their survival to the quick thinking of fellow students who snapped padlocks on to the outside of the doors, locking them in but tricking the attackers into believing the rooms were empty.
At least one student fought back using a weapon that he was not allowed to have on campus.
Fakhr Shezad, a 23-year-old geology student, said he was saved by Kamran Khan, a student leader who drew away the attackers by firing down at them in an internal courtyard with his handgun.
“There is only one entrance to the building so we should have been trapped,” Shezad said. “But after Kamran came out from his room and shot down from the balcony we could escape. He was a hero for us.”
Khan was among the 21 students and staff killed in the attack, according to a figure provided by authorities that hospital workers warned was likely to rise.
Syed Hamid Husain, a chemistry professor, also used a firearm to protect students from the attackers before being shot dead.
Despite some early reports that women were among the victims, the gunmen did not get as far as the hostel for female students before the arrival of security forces, which rushed to cordon off the campus while helicopters were dispatched to monitor the scene from above.
The attackers were soon contained inside two university buildings and killed, two of them by snipers, an army spokesman said.
The injured and dead were swiftly whisked away by a fleet of ambulances dispatched from Pakistan’s various charitable foundations.
Hospital officials said they had treated 50 critically injured patients, most of whom had severe head and chest wounds.
Mohammad Ishaq, a wounded faculty member, said the attackers appeared highly trained. “They were so young but were carrying machine guns and grenades,” he said. “They operated mostly in silence.”
Pakistani Taliban commander Umar Mansoor claimed responsibility for the attack, which he said involved four men. The movement’s official spokesman later denied the claim.
Mansoor was involved in planning the December 2014 assault on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar.
A year on, parents remain jittery and several schools closed early at the weekend around Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, after rumours circulated of a possible attack.
The assault on another educational institution was an embarrassment for a security establishment that has won plaudits for successfully reducing terror attacks.
The beefing-up of school security was among the measures taken after the APS killings, with education institutions around the country ordered to put up high walls.
At Bacha Khan University, the height of the back wall over which the gunmen so easily climbed had been increased by a couple of feet.
That the death toll was so much lower than the APS killings was in part down to luck. With exam season almost finished, only a fraction of the 3,000-strong student body was still revising for tests and preparing for a round of scholarship interviews.
The quiet period in the academic calendar nonetheless offered a deeply symbolic target for the Taliban: the 28th anniversary of the death of Bacha Khan, the legendary nationalist leader after whom the university is named.
Khan, also known as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was a proponent of non-violence who campaigned for the independence of India and resisted the creation of Muslim-majority Pakistan.
He appealed to a secular, left-leaning political tradition among Pashtuns, an ethnic group from which the Taliban also draws support.
A dozen poets were scheduled at the university on Wednesday morning for a recital of Pashtun poetry intended to honour Khan. Instead, said Bangash, the day had become a “victory of the Taliban”.
The sociology professor added: “It is not just the immediate families who are affected, but hundreds of relatives in every part of the province who are feeling terrorised. No one can claim the country is safe when there is so much terror among the people.”(Jon Boone)
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/gunmen-terror-pakistan-university-survivors-bacha-khan-taliban
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