There is no ideology, no grievance, and no cause in the world that can justify putting a bullet through a child’s head. Yet, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has done exactly that again and again with terrifying consistency. Their war has never been confined to soldiers or police. Their real enemy is education, and their preferred target is the child who dares to dream beyond the darkness they impose.
From the blood-soaked halls of the Army Public School in Peshawar to the torched girls’ schools in Swat and Bajaur, the TTP’s message is clear: knowledge is a threat, and ignorance is power. They do not fear books because of what’s written in them they fear the minds they open. For the TTP, a child with a pen is more dangerous than a soldier with a gun.
The tragedy is that the pain they inflict rarely ends with a single act. Survivors grow up with shattered limbs and shattered dreams. Parents bury futures. Entire communities live under the weight of fear. And yet, the world often forgets these victims, reducing their suffering to footnotes in news cycles. Foreign analysts debate Pakistan’s “security policies” while ignoring the fact that children were murdered in cold blood for simply showing up to school.
Every school rebuilt in Pakistan’s tribal areas is a statement of defiance. Every classroom reopened is a blow to the ideology of hate. But the scars remain. And the TTP continues its campaign sometimes with bullets, sometimes with threats, sometimes with propaganda that paints education as un-Islamic, while it is in fact the highest command of the very religion they claim to represent.
Let’s not sanitize it. This is not insurgency. This is not resistance. This is terrorism in its purest, most cowardly form a war against children. And a nation that buries its youngest in the name of fighting terror deserves more than hollow sympathies. It deserves justice.
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