New Taliban assault against a school in Peshawar. Islamists broke into the building, taking nearly 500 including teachers and pupils as hostage.
The operations to free the kids are still going on, while the death toll is being estimated to 120, including 84 pupils.
According to the international media, the action was claimed by the Ttp group (Ttp stands for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan). “We carefully chose the military school for our attack because the government targeted our families, and our women – said their spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani – We want them to feel the same pain”.
The Pakistani Minister of Information, Shah Farman, tried to reassure the population by saying that the army is trying to put the situation under control again. The man also said: “We need our country to remain united, and we need justice”.
Once again jihadist extremism hits the world of education, as happened with the kidnapping of the female students in Nigeria or with the Taliban attack against Malala Yousafzai, the young girl who started her struggle for the right to education precisely in Pakistan.
The assault in Peshawar came one day after the one in Sydney, where Man Haron Monis, a 50-year old man of Iranian descent who was already known to the police, held as hostages 17 people in a chocolate shop. And precisely following the Australian events, today Isis threatens to carry out similar actions in the West and shows pictures of new beheadings in Iraq and Syria.
Some days ago, BBC had spread the results o fan inquiry carried out with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation of London King’s College, which outlined the death toll of fundamentalism. According to this survey the victims of radical Islamist attacks all over the world in November 2014 only were over 5 thousand. If the most violent group is the Islamic state run by Al Baghdadi – which killed 2.206 people in Syria and Iraq – the other jihadist groups, from Boko Haram to Al Qaeda, carried out 664 attacks in 14 countries just in one month.