Pakistani Taliban Attack University in Northwest, Leaving 19 Dead

Bacha Khan University was site of siege on Wednesday

Pakistani Taliban gunmen stormed a university campus in the country’s northwest on Wednesday and killed at least 19 people, officials said.

Local government and police officials said security forces had retaken control of Bacha Khan University, nearly 130 kilometers west of the capital, Islamabad, after an hourslong battle with the militants.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The same splinter group killed more than 130 students at the Army Public School in Peshawar more than a year ago.

Pakistan has ramped up counterterrorism operations over the past two years, waging campaigns in tribal areas in the country’s mountainous northwest that have long been strongholds for the Taliban, al Qaeda and other terror groups.

Those campaigns and a broad nationwide antiterror offensive have sharply reduced the number of attacks in the country over the past 12 months.

TV footage showed people streaming out of the university’s main gate, some rushing to embrace waiting relatives. At the District Headquarters Hospital in Charsadda, weeping relatives embraced survivors.

A peace poetry event was scheduled at the university on Wednesday to mark the death anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a revered 20th century Pashtun political leader who promoted nonviolence and was better known as Bacha Khan. The university is named after him.

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