Nightmare In Pakistan

A Taliban attack on a school in Pakistan has left at least 135 dead, mostly children. Here are some details from the BBC;

Militants from the Pakistani Taliban have attacked an army-run school in Peshawar, leaving at least 135 people dead, most of them children.

All six attackers are said by officials to have been killed but the security forces are still checking for bombs they may have left.

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The BBC's Shahzeb Jillani in Karachi says the militants appear to have been intent on killing as many students as possible - rather than taking hostages, as initially thought.

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More than 100 of the dead are children, a local official told Reuters news agency, although other sources say the number may be slightly smaller.

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Children who escaped from the school say the militants went from one classroom to another, shooting indiscriminately.

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Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has arrived in Peshawar, described the attack as a "national tragedy". Pakistani opposition leader and former cricket captain Imran Khan condemned it as "utter barbarism".

A Taliban spokesman was quoted by Reuters as saying the school had been attacked because the "government is targeting our families and females".

For years, Pakistan supported the Taliban and, it is widely accepted, elements of the government continue to do so. Maybe this atrocity will finally convince them that you can;t make deals with or otherwise control this barbarians. You can only fight them, until the last one is dead and their horrific ideology consigned to the scrapheap of history.

This attack should also call into question any notion that the the US and its allies can negotiate with the Taliban. These people are not human, at least in any meaningful way. Anyway who can go into a building full of children and mercilessly kill them has forfeited their claims to humanity. Our attempts to negotiate with the Taliban - including our capitulation to their demands on Bowe Bergdahl - have obviously not produced any positive results. Nor will they.

Possessed of a ideology that they think was given to them by a god, one that sees the rest of the human race as infidels to be converted, enslaved or killed, the Islamists will never agree to peaceful coexistence. Regardless of what we do, short of complete capitulation and conversion, the Islamists will continue to wage war against the civilized world. The only option is to destroy them and their noxious belief-system.

Sources: BBC, Al Jazeera