From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway

The Gateway to the Khyber Pass, at Peshawar, is an archway to a mountain pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pass was an integral part of the ancient Silk Road and throughout history, it has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia and a strategic military location. It also lies at the end of the Grand Trunk Road.

The heart of Khyber Pakhtonkhwa was initially termed “Pushpapura” and means "the city of flora." Peshawar is sited on the boundary of South Asia and Central Asia and become the business center of South Asia. Peshawar is also known as “The City of Frontier” because the city that link the Afghanistan and Pakistan through the Khyber Pass. Peshawar is the commercial center of the Pakistan based, in part, on their connection to its unique food industry and home of textile, silk, carpets and other items.

From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway, the thread of destruction of human life continues. We living in times of violence.

The Taliban stormed a military-run school in northwest Pakistan, gunning down and killing at least 141 people -- most of them children -- in one of the bloodiest attacks in the country's history.

The Army Public School is located at Warsak Road near Cantonment, Peshawar, which is part of Army Public Schools & Colleges System that runs 146 schools in Pakistan.

The attack began at around noon when seven gunmen, dressed in uniforms of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, entered the school from the back through a cemetery adjacent to the school, after scaling its walls. Before entering the school the gunmen set fire to vehicles, then indiscriminately opened fire with automatic weapons in the central auditorium of the school, where children were gathered for a school function.

The Pakistani Taliban killed 141 people, including 132 children, in an attack on an army run school in Peshawar, a city in the country’s north-west. The attack was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history.

All of the militants in the school attack in northwest Pakistan have been killed, a Peshawar police official says.

Pakistan’s Major General Asim Bajwa says there were seven militants, all wearing suicide jackets, and that several special forces soldiers were wounded in the fighting.

“The terrorists used a ladder to cross the school walls from the graveyard behind the school. The terrorists and the Pakistani army fought in the administrative block of the school.”

He says 960 students and staff were saved in the rescue operation, and that 121 children were wounded during the attack.

This is a short overview of similar attacks in Pakistan.

16 December 2014: Taliban attack on school in Peshawar leaves at least 135 people dead, most of them children

22 September 2013: Militants linked to the Taliban kill at least 80 people at a church in Peshawar, in one of the worst attacks on Christians

10 January 2013: Militant bombers target the Hazara Shia Muslim minority in the city of Quetta, killing 120 at a snooker hall and on a street

28 May 2010: Gunmen attack two mosques of the minority Ahmadi Islamic sect in Lahore, killing more than 80 people

18 October 2007: Twin bomb attack at a rally for Benazir Bhutto in Karachi leaves at least 130 dead. Unclear if Taliban behind attack.

Peshawar is situated in a large valley near the eastern end of the Khyber

Pass.

In 2002, Osama bin Laden slipped into Pakistan. He then lived in at least

five different places including Peshawar before finally settling down in

Abbottabad in 2005. It was there where he was eventually killed by US Navy

SEALs in a covert raid begun on May 1, 2011. The official death date for

Osama bin Laden is given as May 2, 2011.

The operation, code named Zero Dark Thirty, and used as the title of a

famed film on the event, was defined as "a military term for 30 minutes

after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that

cloaked the entire decade-long mission."

The raid was completed shortly after 1am local time when he was shot once

in the chest and once in the head by a Navy Seal who announced, "For God

and country Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo," because Geronimo was the

code-name given to the al-Qaeda leader.