How Inhuman Can a Fanatic Be? Burqa-clad Bomber Murders 40+ in IDP Camp

Adil Najam

Just how inhuman can the murderous zeal of fanatics be?

Here are the essential facts: Two suicide killers, hiding behind burqas, murdered more than 40 people, and injured another 60+, in two explosions minutes apart, at an IDP (internally displaced peoples) refugee camp at Katcha Pakka near Kohat, as they gathered to register for relief goods and as food was being distributed to them.

Yes, you read it right.

They murdered people who have already been made homeless. They killed people gathered to collect food and relief goods. They killed deliberately. They murdered on purpose. This was not an accident or bad planning. They had planned to kill. They had wanted to murder. They planned to kill women and children and innocent civilians.

That is exactly what they wanted to do. That is exactly what they did.

This is neither unique as an incident nor unique in its brutality and inhumanity.

Yesterday, it was a hospital – yes, hospital – that was attacked in Quetta where Muslims were mourning the death of a murdered Shia leader.

The butchers were butchering. Deliberately. Purposefully. Inhumanly.

The blood boils, eyes swell up and humanity cries whenever an innocent soul is killed. No matter why. No matter by whom. No matter how. But when the murder is so callous, so planned, so deliberate, so inhuman, the heart skips a beat, the mind is baffled, and something dies within each one of us. There is nothing more left to say.

What can one say that has not been said before. One seethes in ones anger. One sends out a silent prayer. One wipes off the tears. And one stares into the darkness. Trying desperately, trying senselessly, trying uselessly, to understand why anyone could do such a thing. How anyone could do such a thing.

One stares into the darkness. Knowing full well that no darkness known to man could be darker than the darkness that breeds this murder.