A badly potholed portion of road separates the Warsak garrison from Christian Colony. A few vehicles are parked at a large open space in front of the colony, belonging to people visiting it to offer condolences on the death of a Christian worker killed in Friday’s attack on the neighbourhood.

The garrison is located on the banks of the Kabul River, about 30 kilometres northwest of Peshawar, and abuts on the Mohmand and Khyber tribal regions.

A bullet-riddled and fading grey gate, with a Pakistani flag fluttering on top, leads to the colony. At the entrance, some policemen are on duty, while to the right of the gate is an empty security checkpost. Adjacent to the post is a large barracks, manned by personnel of the Warsak Security Force (WSF) to provide round-the-clock security to the residents.

The colony has four blocks of five houses each, while the fifth block is under construction.

Stains of dried blood are still visible at the entrance to the checkpost, while remains of torched motorbikes can be seen in front of the WSF barracks.

“Samuel Masih died here,” said a policeman, pointing to the bloodstains.

Samuel, a worker at the Peshawar Development Authority (PDA), was on his way to the Hayatabad office when the assailants fired at him just outside the gate. A bleeding Samuel rushed inside and collapsed at the entrance to the post; alerting the guards who proceeded to engage the attackers immediately.

The firing from the guards forced the assailants to take cover in the colony’s under-construction block, located to the left of the gate, where three of them blew themselves up after a stand-off with security personnel lasting more than two hours. The fourth attacker scaled the wall and jumped into the house of Farooq Masih, where he too detonated his explosives vest.

“We were asleep when the firing began,” a visibly shaken Farooq said. While the 10 members of his family locked themselves up inside a tiny room, they heard a thud of someone jumping into their courtyard.

“We heard knocks at the door and I thought the time was up for my family,” Farooq said. Luckily for them, however, a door at the other end of the room opened into the backstreet.

Farooq and his family managed to make it to the street as bullets flew around them and took shelter inside Mushtaq Masih’s house. They remained there until the security personnel asked them to come out. They were taken to a small church where they remained until the security forces had searched and cleared the compound.

Farooq’s two-room house was turned into an assortment of debris after the suicide attacker blew himself up there. Cutlery, two refrigerators, beds, chairs and doors lay scattered while there was a gaping hole in a portion of the wall.

“There were three loud bangs in the under-construction block and the fourth one came from my house,” Farooq said.

An attacker torched a motorcycle in Laban Siddiq’s house, next to his house. The walls of the rooms in the construction block, where three of the assailants had detonated their explosives vests, were plastered with blood and human remains. The two rooms were filled with the stench of blood and burnt flesh.

Samuel’s brother, Mushtaq Masih, said the slain PDA worker left his home at around 5am and that as soon as he left the firing began. He said he tried to call his brother back amid the sound of intense firing.

“It was after the operation was over that we were informed by security personnel that we had to collect his body from the Combined Military Hospital,” he said.

The residents said the Wapda security men and the other security personnel took nearly 30 minutes to reach the colony. “Had the guards not stopped attackers from heading directly for the colony’s streets, the attackers would have slaughtered many, going from one house to another,” said Farooq’s sister, Shaheen.

“I thought we were never going to get out of it, but when I heard a man shouting ‘Naara-i-Takbeer’ and others responding with ‘Allah-o-Akbar’, I realised that our army had arrived and that the siege was over,” she said.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak visited the colony on Saturday. However, the residents were not happy with his gesture.

“He did not bother to look around the colony. He just sat in a room for some minutes and then left. He left even without uttering a few words of sympathy for Samuel,” one of them said.

Published in Dawn, September 4th, 2016