DERA ISMAIL KHAN: A leader of a Taliban faction released the video footage on Friday of four militants who, he said, had carried out Wednesday’s assault on a university in Charsadda.

The footage strengthened indications of a possible split in the Taliban whose spokesman Mohammad Khorasani had issued a written statement that evening disassociating the group from the attack and calling it un-Islamic.

But the same day, a Taliban faction’s leader Umar Mansoor told Reuters his fighters had attacked the campus.

Mansoor is considered close to Mullah Fazlullah, the embattled leader of the fractious Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan.

The footage shows the four attackers, two of them in their mid-teens, practising shooting as part of their training before carrying out the Charsadda attack.

The video which spread rapidly on Facebook but was not released on media accounts of the TTP.

The fresh attack had chilling echoes of a 2014 assault on a school in Peshawar, also claimed by Mansoor’s faction.

Mansoor had issued a similar video in the wake of the Peshawar attack on Dec 16, 2014.

The authenticity of the video could not be independently verified.

After the 2014 Peshawar school massacre, Taliban militants were united in taking responsibility for the violence and some analysts say that the divisions over Wednesday’s attack probably have more to do with a fear of retribution than a reflection of a deeply fractured and split militant movement.

The Peshawar attack was seen as having hardened the country’s resolve to fight the militants.

Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2015