Splinter Taliban group behind university slaughter threatens more attacks

The head of a breakaway Taliban faction behind an assault on a Pakistani university which left 21 people dead threatened on Friday to carry out more such attacks. Khalifa Umar Mansoor said the killings at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda were just the start and promised his followers would hit the “evil democratic system” at its base. In a video posted on social media, the head of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistani faction said educational institutions provided the future workforce for the military and the government — all of which worked against the “will of God”. Instead of targeting armed soldiers, Mansoor said, “we will target the nurseries that produce these people”.

We will continue to attack schools, colleges and universities across Pakistan as these are the foundations that produce apostates. We will target and demolish the foundations

Khalifa Umar Mansoor

In Wednesday’s attack, heavily armed gunmen stormed the campus in Charsadda in northwest Pakistan in an attack that had chilling echoes of a 2014 assault on a school in nearby Peshawar, also claimed by Mansoor’s faction. The rampage threatened to shatter the sense of security growing in the troubled region a year after the Peshawar attack in which more than 150 people, mostly children, were killed. The authenticity of Friday’s video could not be independently verified but it was similar to previous messages released by the group. Although Mansoor’s group quickly took responsibility for the university attack, a spokesman for the larger Taliban organization, led by Mullah Fazlullah, denied having anything to do with it and called it “un-Islamic.”

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