Ripped asunder

The butchers have been at work again. This time the attack was near Shabqadar Bazaar on March 7 when a suicide bomber detonated outside court premises. The device was loaded with ball-bearings and killed 17 including three police personnel. A security officer was suspicions and stopped the bomber before he was able to enter the courts prompting the detonation. At least another 25 people were injured. The attack was quickly claimed by a TTP splinter group, Jamatul Ahrar, whose spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan claimed the atrocity as “revenge” for the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri. He went on to say that civilians have not been killed (women and children were among the dead and injured) and that the target was the court and the judges whose practices were “un-Islamic”.

Once again, the Taliban have displayed their willingness to murder at will, irrespective of whether civilians are their victims. Yet it is not only those Taliban that are self-declared. Anybody that defends the Taliban, however disingenuously, is no better than the murderers that planned and executed the attack. Those that are fellow travellers, those that provide shelter and food to those who commit such acts are themselves complicit. They have blood on their hands and murder in their hearts. They are the support structure that allows free rein to killers who shred the lives of innocents. The dead will be buried, but the survivors will have to live out their lives with a range of disabilities, forever blighted by hatred.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in condoling the victims’ families said that he condemned “terrorist acts” and that “the nation is united in its commitment to wipe out this menace from our soil” — about which he could not be more wrong. The nation is anything but united in seeking or even wishing that events such as this most recent iteration of man’s inhumanity to man, are to be eradicated. The nation is awash with people who are similarly minded to the Taliban and have little desire to ‘wipe out’ this menace. Terrorists dictate the narrative and until narrative control is seized from them, men, women and children will be torn asunder. Again. And again. And again.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2016.

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