“Riz, you have a phone call,” were the first words I heard as I entered the air-crew room after a mission.

I grabbed a mug of coffee and walked to the land line, hardly expecting it to be my 10-year-old baby sister on the other end. It was a surprise; she had never called me at my squadron before.

I tried recalling if I had forgotten anything she had asked for but nothing strikes my mind. Before I could even say anything, I heard loud erratic breathing. In her trembling voice she said:

“You’re going to kill each and every one of the bad guys out there, right?”

I was stunned. I said, yes, of course, that’s what I am here for.

She replied only with a “thank you” and hung up.

“A school in Peshawar has just been attacked,” I learnt, and for a moment I thought I had heard wrong.

How could someone attack a school, I asked myself. Even taking the perverse exploitation of religion by pseudo cults into account, how could someone think of targeting innocent children who would not even know why were they being targeted?