DERA ISMAIL KHAN: A senior Pakistani Taliban commander released video footage on Friday of four fighters he said carried out Wednesday’s deadly assault on a university in Pakistan’s northwest that killed 20 people and vowed more attacks on schools in future.
The footage raised fresh questions of a possible split in the fractured Taliban leadership, whose official spokesman has denied the group was behind the assault.
Militants scaled the walls of Bacha Khan University in Charsadda on Wednesday morning and killed 20 people before being gunned down by army commandos and police.
Taliban spokesman Mohammad Khorasani issued a written statement that evening disassociating the group from the attack and calling it un-Islamic.
But the same day, a Taliban faction commander Umar Mansoor told Reuters his fighters had targeted the campus because it prepared students to join the government and army.
Mansoor is considered close to Mullah Fazlullah, the embattled leader of the fractious Pakistan Taliban group.
The reason for the conflicting claims by the official spokesman and Mansoor was not immediately clear but has led to speculation of a possible split in the Taliban leadership.
“Now we will not kill the soldier in his cantonment, the lawyer in the court or the politician in parliament but in the places where they are prepared, the schools, the universities, the colleges that lay their foundation,” a bearded Mansoor said in the video, holding an admonishing finger aloft.
“With the mercy of god, our attacks on all universities and schools will continue.”
The video also shows four attackers, two of them in their mid teens, practicing shooting as part of their training before carrying out the Charsadda attack.
Pakistan has killed and arrested hundreds of suspected militants under a major crackdown launched after Taliban gunmen massacred 134 children at a military-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar in December 2014.
The Peshawar school attack was seen as having hardened Pakistan’s resolve to fight militants along its border with Afghanistan.
Senior Taliban militant vows more school attacks
Senior Taliban militant vows more school attacks
Afghan hunger crisis deepens as aid funding falls short, UN says
- International aid to war-torn Afghanistan has dwindled significantly since 2021
- “For the first time in decades, WFP cannot launch a significant winter response,” the UN agency said
KABUL: The UN World Food Programme is unable for the first time in decades to provide effective aid to millions of Afghans suffering from malnutrition, with deaths especially among children likely to rise this winter, the WFP said on Tuesday.
International aid to war-torn Afghanistan has dwindled significantly since 2021, when US-led forces exited the country and the Taliban regained power. The crisis has been compounded by multiple natural calamities such as earthquakes.
“For the first time in decades, WFP cannot launch a significant winter response, while also scaling up emergency and nutrition support nationwide,” the UN agency said in a statement, adding that it needed over $460 million to deliver food assistance to six million most vulnerable Afghans.
“With child malnutrition already at its highest level in decades, and unprecedented reductions in (international) funding for agencies providing essential services, access to treatment is increasingly scarce,” it said.
Child deaths are likely to rise during Afghanistan’s freezing winter months when food is scarcest, it said.
The WFP estimates that 17 million people face hunger, up about 3 million from last year, a rise driven in part by millions of Afghans deported from neighboring Iran and Pakistan under programs to send back migrants and refugees.
Humanitarian agencies have warned that Afghanistan lacks the infrastructure to absorb a sudden influx of returnees.
“We are only 12 percent funded. This is an obstacle,” Jean-Martin Bauer, WFP Director of Food Security and Nutrition Analysis, told a press briefing in Geneva. He added that 3.7 million Afghan children were acutely malnourished, 1 million of whom were severe cases. “So yes, children are dying,” he said.
