Anaya, the wife, told Voice of the Martyrs that she almost stayed home from church that Sunday morning.  

“Her husband, Fahmi, a youth ministry coordinator, was on the other side of the world at a Christian youth leaders’ conference,” says Voice of the Martyrs Korea Representative Dr. Hyun Soon Foley. “The couple’s 9-year-old daughter Naher had woken up with a fever. But she and her 11-year-old brother Ishan begged their mother to take them to Sunday school. Anaya finally agreed, and they headed to All Saints Church, just as they did every week.”  

Naher’s fever worsened, though, so she came to the sanctuary to rest in her mother’s lap about halfway through the morning service.  

“Anaya planned to skip the regular fellowship time after the service so she could get her sick daughter home, but she stopped briefly to talk with her sister and brother-in-law, and Ishan ran off to play with some friends,” says Representative Foley.  

Then Anaya’s world was shattered.  

At 11:43 a.m., two suicide bombers detonated their explosives amid the roughly 700 congregants who had gathered in the courtyard for a fellowship meal. The death toll was initially reported to be 81, including seven children, with at least 150 more people injured. Anaya was seriously injured, while Ishan and Naher were among the seven children killed. 

Nine time zones away, Fahmi was roused from sleep by a phone call. His cousin had seen footage of the Peshawar bombing on the news. 

Fahmi immediately called Anaya’s phone but got no answer. He called every family member and friend he could think of, but nobody answered his calls. 

“I turned on a Pakistani news channel and I saw the faces, all those faces familiar to me, who were injured,” Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs. “It seemed I was watching all of my family on that television.” 

Eventually, Fahmi reached a friend who told him that Anaya was badly hurt. He knew nothing about the children. 

Within hours, Fahmi was on a flight back to Pakistan.  

“He was gathering bits and pieces of information as he traveled, checking the news and continuing to call between flights,” says Representative Foley. “He gradually learned that his mother, two uncles, his brother-in-law and some cousins had all been killed. In addition, his brothers, nieces and nephews, sister-in-law and many friends were injured. And finally, someone confirmed that his own children had been killed.” 

Peshawar, with a population of more than 2 million, is the gateway to the dangerous border frontier with Afghanistan. It is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, a violence-plagued area in northwestern Pakistan where bombings and assassinations are not uncommon. 

Its mountainous, cave-riddled terrain has made KPK the home of numerous Islamic terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and the Taliban. The militant group Jundallah, an offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the All Saints bombing. 

Two Jundallah suicide bombers, each wearing 13 pounds of hidden explosives packed with ball bearings and other metal pieces to cause maximum damage, slipped into the church with local workers who were delivering food for the fellowship meal.  

Now, 11 years later, the bombing remains one of the deadliest attacks committed against Christians in Pakistan. The final death toll was 127 people. 

Representative Foley says that through all of the suffering and grief, All Saints Church remained a light to the community. “A week after the attack, the church was open and filled with worshipers, including many of the wounded and bereaved,” says Representative Foley. “And when, near the close of the service, a car bomb was detonated in a market only blocks away, churchgoers responded in prayer rather than blind panic.” She says the church was even built to look more like a mosque on the outside in order to be more welcoming to the Muslims who make up 98% of Peshawar’s population. 

When Fahmi arrived back in Peshawar, his first stop was to see his wife at the hospital. She was in the intensive care unit, passing in and out of consciousness, her body burned and riddled with shrapnel from the bombs. Because of her fragile condition, doctors advised Fahmi to hide the truth about the children’s deaths from Anaya. The visit lasted only a few minutes before nurses sent him away. Fahmi’s next stop was the morgue, to identify his children and see his mother’s body. 

Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs that the days that followed were a blur. “Between short visits with Anaya, Fahmi visited others who had survived the attack,” says Representative Foley. “He prayed with and comforted widows, widowers, orphans and parents who, like him, had lost family members in the blasts. He sat with the injured and provided encouragement, while privately carrying his own grief.” 

About 10 days after the bombing, a pastor visited All Saints and shared a message from Romans 8. “He put a question before us,” Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs. “Who will separate us [from the love of God]? Will this persecution? I asked this question of myself while I was sitting in the church. Then I gave the same answer as St. Paul did: Nothing can separate us from the love of God. So that was the first motivation and strengthening of my faith.” 

When Anaya was moved to a regular hospital ward, Fahmi finally told her about the deaths of Ishan and Naher. She was stunned, and then she was angry that Fahmi had kept the truth from her, angry that she had not gotten to say goodbye. 

Despite Anaya’s anger, Fahmi was relieved that they could finally mourn the loss of their children together.  

“When I was in the hospital, my faith was a little bit shaken and I was asking God why he had taken both of them,” Anaya told Voice of the Martyrs. “Even then I was not blaming God; I didn’t give up my faith. In all this mourning and throughout this situation, God was with us. It was God who consoled us and gave us comfort.” 

Anaya began to have dreams of her children, seeing them in a place she recognized as heaven. “That also gave me some comfort that my children are in this place,” she said. 

Representative Foley says that a few months after Anaya’s release from the hospital, the couple received two gifts from God that brought them unexpected comfort and healing. “In the new year, Anaya became pregnant with a daughter,” says Representative Foley. “And Fahmi and Anaya were able to receive biblical counseling in another country for their trauma and loss.” Representative Foley says that the couple went on to have another child as well.  

“When Fahmi and Anaya returned to Peshawar after they had received counseling, they brought with them a desire to develop a biblical counseling ministry to help others like they had been helped,” says Representative Foley. “So with the approval of the church leadership in Pakistan, they relocated in 2015 and Fahmi began pursuing a degree in pastoral counseling.” 

Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs that after he graduated, he received offers to serve in safer places, both in Pakistan and abroad. But the family returned to Peshawar, where Fahmi took up a teaching position at a Christian seminary while initiating his counseling work.  

Through trauma seminars, care camps for the survivors and other teaching opportunities, Fahmi explains to participants what the Bible teaches about suffering and persecution. He says the result is that the church has grown stronger in faith since the attack.  

“When the media came and asked many of the victims in our church [about forgiveness], everyone said that we had forgiven them,” Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs. But he said they answered that way because they knew they should, not because it was really true. “This is really difficult, to forgive those who kill your children,” he said.  

But time spent in solitude and contemplation, as well as his pastoral counseling studies, forced Fahmi to confront the unforgiveness in his heart.  

“It was a long struggle,” he said, “but after 10 years I can say that we have really forgiven them, because our Lord Jesus forgave those who persecuted him.”  

Fahmi told Voice of the Martyrs that the message he wants other Christians to learn from the bombing is that to be a Christian is to walk by faith rather than fear. “Anything could happen at any time, anywhere, but if we have strong faith in God, if we believe Jesus is with us, there is no need to fear.”