Main content

Histories of Violence

Tales from Peshawar's Army Public school; an Iraqi airbase under attack; a Turkish church turned sanctuary; a textile workshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Bourbon country in France.

Stories of bravery and bloodshed from Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Bangladesh and France.

Shaimaa Khalil witnesses the aftermath of the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar and hears from the families and pupils struggling to find words for their suffering and grief.

Quentin Sommerville is on the Ayn al Asad airbase in Anbar province. It was once called 鈥渢he safest place in Iraq鈥 by George W Bush, but now it's under sustained attack from Islamic State.

Malcolm Billings explores a small, tightly-knit and spontaneous community: the migrants who鈥檝e congregated in a church in Istanbul and used their skills to restore it as they continue their journey to seek asylum.

Caroline Eden meets the weavers at work in a Bangladeshi textile industry with a difference - not sewing sweatshop fast fashion, but weaving exquisite, old-fashioned and expensive jamdani saris.

And Hugh Schofield follows the illustrious name of the Bourbon dynasty: an epic journey from Celtic gods to the French throne 鈥 and thence to whiskey and biscuits.

(Photo: Pakistani children hold candles during a vigil in Islamabad on December 2014, for the children and teachers killed in an attack by Taliban militants on an army-run school in Peshawar. Credit: Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Images)

Available now

25 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Sun 21 Dec 2014 01:05GMT
  • Sun 21 Dec 2014 09:05GMT