One of the startling thing about Western responses to current Islamic extremism is how it misunderstands the essential thrust of the problem.
We in the West are mesmerised by the ranting of so-called Islamic leaders against “the Great Satan” and threats to extend their rule over all the world.
In fact, nothing of the sort is happening. What is really happening throughout the Middle East and elsewhere is a sectarian conflict between Muslims and between ethnic groups who also happen to be Muslim.
As we mourn two dead hostages in Sydney, so Pakistan now mourns an infinitely more horrible attack from the Taliban from the tribal areas of its own country. As AFP and Yahoo report, a teenage survivor of a Taliban attack on a Pakistan school has described how he played dead after being shot in both legs by insurgents hunting down students to kill.
Militants rampaged through an army-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar and killed at least 141 people, almost all of them children, in the bloodiest ever terror attack in Pakistan. Chief military spokesman General Asim Bajwa said 132 students and nine staff were killed, and 125 wounded. This exceeds the 139 killed in blasts targeting former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Karachi in 2007.
Speaking from his bed in the trauma ward of the city’s Lady Reading Hospital, Shahrukh Khan, 16, said he and his classmates were in a careers guidance session in the school auditorium when four gunmen wearing paramilitary uniforms burst in.
“Someone screamed at us to get down and hide below the desks,” he said, adding that the gunmen shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) before opening fire.
“Then one of them shouted: ‘There are so many children beneath the benches, go and get them’,” Khan told AFP.
“I saw a pair of big black boots coming towards me, this guy was probably hunting for students hiding beneath the benches.”
Khan said he felt searing pain as he was shot in both his legs just below the knee.
He decided to play dead, adding: “I folded my tie and pushed it into my mouth so that I wouldn’t scream.
“The man with big boots kept on looking for students and pumping bullets into their bodies. I lay as still as I could and closed my eyes, waiting to get shot again.
“My body was shivering. I saw death so close and I will never forget the black boots approaching me — I felt as though it was death that was approaching me.”
The Army Public School is attended by boys and girls from both military and civilian backgrounds.
As his father, a shopkeeper, comforted him in his blood-soaked bed, Khan recalled: “The men left after some time and I stayed there for a few minutes. Then I tried to get up but fell to the ground because of my wounds.
“When I crawled to the next room, it was horrible. I saw the dead body of our office assistant on fire,” he said.
“She was sitting on the chair with blood dripping from her body as she burned.”
It was not immediately clear how the female employee’s body caught fire, though her remains were also later seen by an AFP reporter in a hospital mortuary.
Khan, who said he also saw the body of a soldier who worked at the school, crawled behind a door to hide and then lost consciousness.
“When I woke up I was lying on the hospital bed,” he added.
‘Only I survived’
Another student at the hospital, Hammad Ahmed, added: “I was with my friends in the corridor in front of my class when we heard gunshots.
“We rushed inside the classroom, our teacher closed the door, she was trying to lock it when the terrorists kicked on the door and forced it open,” he continued.
“All 10 of my classmates and our teacher died, only I survived,” he said.
But like Khan, he survived despite being shot in the feet because his attackers assumed he was already dead and moved on.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have claimed responsibility for the attack as retaliation for a major military offensive in the region, and with incredibly chilling cruelty said its militants had been ordered to shoot older students.
This is just the latest in a pattern of sectarian bombings and massacres that far outweigh any attacks on the West or Western interests.There is a civil war raging – raging to the death – in Pakistan/Afghanistan that is largely misunderstood by most people in Western countries. Many of the most recent horrors have been designed by militants to derail tentative peace moves between the Governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan and America and the Taliban.
Elswhere, IS, for example, in Syria and Iraq, is almost entirely concerned with taking over Sunni regions and imposing its own “pure” version of Islam, indiscriminately slaughtering Christians and Shia Muslims by the tens of thousands.
Over the years, Shia attacks on Sunnis have been equally bloody.
The participants have no real anger with the West, no matter how wildly they proclaim that they do. In fact, we are merely useful targets to galvanise their own supporters.
Far from presaging some wider conflict in which the Middle East turns outwards and invades the rest of the world, killing Westerners is, in fact, the violent version of nothing more than a slogan to enliven the supporters of one side or the other.
What is to be done?
One could write for days and only start to scratch the surface. But it is important for the West to understand that – with peaceful periods of co-existence – this conflict has been raging for 1500 years. What makes it so terrifying now is the free availability of weapons of all kinds that enable such terrible destruction, and also that over 95% of violent deaths in conflicts around the world occur from bullets.
Starving the region of small arms and ammunition would be a far more effective strategy for the West, if it really wants to be involved, than indiscriminate bombs and invasions of societies which we do not understand, and which do not seem particularly inclined to understand us.
As we pray and weep for the 2 dead hostages in Sydney, which so galvanised world attention, let us also pause, pray and weep for the dead and insured of Peshawar, and their parents and families.
Well, This Is What I Think 