Winchester
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Nine minutes after the first call from Army Public School Principal Tahira Qazi, who reported the incident as per existing standard operating procedure, the damage had been done. By the time calls were intercepted, one of the attackers was telling his handler in Afghanistan, “We have killed 350 of them.” Later the toll was confirmed at 147.
Six minutes before that, a daily army briefing was interrupted again and informed the Quick Response Force (QRF) — which had been dispatched and would reach in three minutes — would not be enough.
At the CCPO around the same time: “There is firing going on in the area near APS,” an army officer told the capital police around 10am. This message was relayed to the then SSP who called the 2nd Brigade. A colonel confirmed only that firing had been heard. He asked for the police Rapid Response Force (RRF) strike force. According to a senior police official still in service, after the CCPO consulted with the colonel, the RRF was also dispatched.
Till then the intercepts had not come in and the APS siege was being treated as a hostage situation. It was only when surveillance vehicles picked up on chatter when the real intention of the attackers suddenly became crystal clear.
Well into the action, more communication was intercepted: “The target here is better”, reflecting the terrorists were moving towards the younger students. That was then when the Special Services Group (SSG) or special ops — who were awaiting confirmation—jumped in. The school was breached and the operation began. The orders were clear: “Not a single child should be hurt”.
December 16 was one of the most challenging days faced by the armed forces and law-enforcement – it was not a situation that could be suppressed by brute force. It required a precision strike which selectively eliminated the terrorists (which were an unknown number) amid 1,880 innocents, according to the school register. No one could storm the school.
9:20am inside the school
Around 9:20am, students were collecting into the auditorium for a first aid drill.
“It was third period, we had just started reading the [Urdu] book when the section head knocked on the classroom door and asked us all to move to the auditorium where there was a first-aid training by CMH doctors,” according to ninth grader Sheheryar Zafar.
Muneeb Dawar, a college freshman and head boy (proctor) told The Express Tribune he was standing at the front of the auditorium, directing the boys pouring in to fill the front seats.
“The doors of the hall were closed by the head boy that day,” said Mubeen, another student. “I was among the proctors, the head boy gestured to me to come in the centre rows and tell students to make space and be attentive.”
It took 15 minutes to set the projectors and start the seminar and after 10 minutes, the firing started. They all heard it but didn’t think much of it. Sheheryar thought it was just a drill.
When the gunshots moved closer, the teachers locked the doors and the trainers told the students not to be scared. But then the attackers banged the auditorium door, not once but thrice, breaking down the door the third time, entering under the cover of a hail of bullets.
That terrifying second, the principal was on the stage and the doctor was delivering the lecture, Muneeb froze in the front and Sheheryar hit the ground to hide. Students panicked.
That was when Principal Tahira Qazi left to make the call which set things in motion outside. A month later, her son Ahmad Qazi said she was so focused on her students, she did not call the family but went back in even though she could have saved herself when the two security forces personnel giving the first aid training did. One of them, a major, was court martialled later for leaving the hall.
Time, unfortunately, did not freeze at 10:30am. It was hours of rampage by the armed men in boots. The boots which still raise spectres of terror in children who, face pressed to ground, tie in the mouth to muffle their screams, remember the black boots walk close to bodies to kick them to separate the living from the dead, to shoot the living dead.
According to a then high-ranking home department official, the terrorists were following instructions of their handlers, calls tapped into by military intelligence during live action. Instructions which amounted to kill all those who are adult (“naaf peh baal, baloghat kee nishani”), attackers were told to kill those who were adults, said the home department official.
And so, inside the auditorium, bodies were piling up; bodies which saved the living hiding under the cover of death.
Outside, a militant on the roof was taking out students running out of the hall. Mubeen said he saw his class fellows crumple under the bullets from the sniper’s gun.
“I moved from the auditorium to the administration block to find our teachers but things were worse there – nearly all of them were shot, either dead or very injured,” said Mubeen. Some said burned. By then, students who had survived the auditorium were trying to get the main entrance and the attackers were looking for more ‘targets’.
Mubeen and Muneeb locked themselves in a toilet in the administration where they were found and rescued by the army around 5pm.
Students in classes adjacent to the auditorium were trying hide under tables. According to Zalik*, their teacher Safia told them to lock their door but he and his mates misunderstood her and ran outside. Instead running back to class and risking getting caught by the militant sniper, the teacher told them to hide under the staircase outside.
Zalik, who was in grade six, said they hid there for nearly one-and-a-half hours. By then it was almost noon. “We could hear sounds from outside and thought it was more terrorists but it was the faujis.” He said commandos helped removed the steel door going towards the toddlers section from where they were evacuated towards the Defence Park side at 12pm.
Eye witnesses say the militants came to the first hall around 10:30am and then returned at 12:15pm to 12:30pm to see if there were any students alive which they could finish off. In the second round, they methodically searched rooms, toilets, corridors, even behind sofas to kill everyone.
10:30am outside
While all of this was taking place inside the school, the QRF managed to reach the site with six minutes instead of the average of eight. There were two brigadier-ranking officials and the Inspector General Frontier Corps outside the school but there was little information of what was going on inside.
Munnawar* whose nephew was inside says he was one of the first to arrive outside APS as his office was within running distance.
From his vantage point as a worried relative, Munnawar said he overheard the RRF, saying “we will do the operation”. The police had fired at a suicide bomber who exploded, according to Munnawar. However, there are SOPs and matters of jurisdiction which need to be abided by. According to the senior-ranking policeman, the army had forbidden the RRF from entering. “We wanted to draw the attacker out but the army did not allow.”
The worried uncle managed to push past a man he recalled as Brigadier Waqar. “I told him ‘My kid is inside’ and just pushed through in.” Once inside, the army men taking positions told him “na agay na peccha [jana], the terrorists do not know that you’re not one of us.” Munnawar had no time to absorb the blood and chaos inside as he moved the troops, helping rescue children.
A lecturer at a college who lived nearby arrived at APS around 10:45am but was told he would be unable to go home down the road, as was a firing incident in play. “Five minutes later, the first siren blazed through the winter morning. And then they just kept on coming.”
He added, “The QRF unit was trying to stop them from spreading in the college, from reaching the toddlers section.”
Munnawar says he heard the first blast while he was inside the school around 11am – Mubeen puts the time at 11:30am, others heard blasts throughout the day. However by the time the SSG unit arrived from Tarbela, the QRF was helping evacuate as many children as they could, some from the Bihari Colony side, some around Defence Park.
The senior police official says the operation ended by 4:40pm, the former home department office holder puts it at 3pm, but the area was not considered clear by sundown. SSGs were on neighbouring rooftops for three days.
The lecturer was also in charge of security at his college. Pointing out how the terrorists kept up a fight for hours, he said, all that ammunition, the rounds, the bombs, “how could it be so well-hidden and transported about in a car [that no law-enforcement noticed].”
His relative, who observed the attack from the proximity of his house, said he counted “at least 29 blasts”.
A meticulously planned attack
The first threat to the school came in April of 2015, it was a “generalized” threat which mentioned APS but there are a number of Army Public Schools in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The threat was taken seriously, but there was nothing specific to help with precautions.
After the attack on the airport in Karachi, Operation Zarb-e-Azb had begun and concentration shifted to North Waziristan and Khyber Agency. Nonetheless, threats in urbanised localities never subsided. The military, police and law-enforcement agencies continued to foil terror bids.
On an average there are 19 threats reported daily in the city of Peshawar alone. Based on which intelligence-based operations (IBO) are carried out. The tactics of the militant groups kept changing.
For instance, officials said about the APS attack that the suicide jacket and handlers were now brought in separately. There was an IBO carried out on the morning of December 16; ten suicide bombers were apprehended. It was thought the treat had been averted, that’s what official accounts of the incident say.
Apart from the attackers killed inside the school, the six facilitators—four of whom were hanged—included a mosque imam, a clerk and a rickshaw driver who kept photographing the area around the school with an Ipad for almost 8 months when he dropped children to school. Investigators say one of the facilitators was arrested from Bahwalnagar within 24 hours of the incident.
But the way the entire attack was meticulously planned showed the intent was not shock and awe but precise elimination of “the enemy”.
All six facilitators, Hazrat Ali, Mujeebur Rehman , Maulvi Abdul Salam, Taj Mohammad, Sabeel and Atiqur Rehman, who were sentenced to death and a seventh, Kifayatullah, was sentenced to life in prison had never met. They worked on the same plan but none of them ever met each other in the run-up to December 16. They did not know who the others were and would be unable to recognise them. The attackers were Pakistanis and belonged from Mohmand Agency, Kohat, Peshawar and Khyber Agency. None of them were highly educated and records show they had a proclivity towards violence.
While it’s now been established that the attackers had stayed the night with the imam of the mosque which was government property, the others were assigned tasks to facilitate in various ways. Locals from the areas around APS told officials they had spotted the men with masks much before the incident had taken place and noted suspicious activity but had not informed the authorities out of fear. Bihari Colony is not populated with a people who trust authorities which do not cater to even their most basic needs.
Of blame and death
Once the APS operation was over, there were rumours about the casualty figures—people in all echelons believed there were bodies in the hundreds evacuated from the school. Security officials say the traumatic effect of the incident impeded how people formed opinions about the incident, particularly those who lived through the attack either directly or through the trauma of a son inside.
To date the list of martyrs released by the ISPR is 147 which include 122 students, 22 staff members and 3 military personnel, including Lance Naik Muhammad Iltaf who jumped in front of gunfire to save students despite orders to refrain.
Tales surfaced of insiders involved in the job. The person who ran the canteen who was rumoured to have been involved in planning the attack still runs it to this date and is resident of Cherat, Nowshera district.
The main perpetrators of the attack Khalif Umar Mansoor whose real name is said to be Aurangzeb and is a resident of Badabher, Peshawar and TTP chief Maulana Fazlullah have been hiding in Afghanistan, where the APS attack was planned. There have been other incidents of violence traced back to the same group in the months that have followed.
As a result, from high-level officials in the home department to locals on ground, Afghan refugees have been blamed. “During 1977, Afghans arrived and the jihadis started; Peshawar felt the repercussions – in blasts,” said the home department official. “Officially, they need to be returned and they are the root of all evil, at the nexus of all gangs,” he added. Instead of letting them spread, he said, they have to be “kept in one place and all provinces have to help manage.”
However, military operations have gained much ground to avert the possibility of any such incident in the future. APS shifted narratives, nationally, and now the point remains to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
**Based in part on eye-witness accounts
Inside APS - For Peshawar
