Post-9/11 US invasion of Afghanistan and its repercussions
 

Thousands die, many flee hometowns in Pakistan for ** fault of theirs



PESHAWAR: The invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 by a broad US-led coalition reverberated throughout the region with Afghan militants and other fighters from around the world fleeing across the border into Pakistan.

Subsequently, there was a huge spike in attacks on civilians. Militants and ******* kept coming to Pakistan via the porous Pak-Afghan border.

Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif said recently Pakistan has suffered 71,000 casualties since 2002, including 18,000 civilians and 5,000 members of the armed forces while 4,8000 people, among them civilians and security personnel, were injured.

In 2003, Pakistani security forces launched massive offensives against the militants who came from neighbouring Afghanistan and started regrouping in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

In 2009, the military conducted a ****** of offensives to root out militants of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Khyber Agency-based Lashkar-e-Islam led by Mangal Bagh and foreigners from swaths of Fata. These operations also drove around five million from their homes. Meanwhile, the US drone strikes targeting militants also killed a number of civilians, inflaming local tension.

There is ** specific data as the militants and security establishment neither allowed media **r NGOs to work in the tribal areas and collect figures.On May 21, 2016, an American drone killed Mulla Akhtar Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, in Balochistan, southwest Pakistan.

This followed the May 2, 2011, killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs in a compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad.In spite of the US and Pakistan’s fight back against militants, Pakistani civilians continue to die on the edges of America’s longest war.

The war has brought widespread mi****** and human and financial losses to Pakistan.There is **t a single sector that remained safe from terrorism and violence that began in Pakistan after former military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf proudly jumped into the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Children remained the biggest sufferers of the war. They were killed in the airstrikes, bomb blasts and explosions caused by IEDs and drone strikes in the tribal areas.Their schools were blown up, their studies were affected and they were uprooted from their native villages and towns.

The story of 14-year old Azhar Mahmood from **rth Waziristan is the story of the majority of schoolgoing children.Azhar Mahmood wasn’t even born when New York’s twin towers and Pentagon were attacked on September 11, 2001.

** Pakistanis were implicated in the attack, yet he feels he and his family are being punished for a crime committed by strangers half-a-world away.“I don’t understand why we are paying for the terrorist attacks in the US when neither ?Pakistan **r Afghanistan were involved in the attacks,” he told The News.

Azhar Mahmood belongs to Miranshah, the headquarters if **rth Waziristan, a mountai**us region that has seen much of the militant spillover from neighbouring Afghanistan. His family’s life mirrors an estimated one million of civilians who have been driven from their homes by spiraling militant violence and the ensuring military *****down.

His parents had enrolled him at the best available educational institution of Miranshah, the Army Public School (APS). Azhar Mahmood and his classmates had narrowly escaped when a suicide bomber detonated in front of them one day after classes at the Army Public School were over and they were waiting for school bus.

“Hundreds of students gathered and were waiting for their parents and rides home when a suicide bomber came and blew up,” he recalled. He doesn’t k**w exactly how many students were killed and injured but what he recalls is that, “there was a huge explosion in the parking area where dozens of vehicles had arrived to pick the students. There was a thick black ***** around us, followed by heavy firing by the security forces.”

After this attack, the school was kept close for several days. While unhurt, Azhar Mahmood said he was terrified and stayed home for two weeks after the suicide attack. But he eventually had to return to classes. “My parents wanted me to continue my studies,” he said.

“It was a difficult decision for our family as some of the family members wanted me and my cousins to continue our studies in our native Miranshah town while my father and others were in favour of sending us to a relatively peaceful city of Peshawar. It was the most difficult time when I and my cousins were saying goodbye to Waziristan,” Azhar Mahmood recalled.

When the militants became stronger, they began dictating local people and started interfering in their affairs.The school administration and local officials struggled to keep the kids safe while also maintaining a semblance of **rmality in the face of rising militant attacks.

They told students to stop wearing **rmal school uniforms and instead don the traditional shalwar Kameez in order to be less conspicuous as the militants asked them **t to wear paint shirt.

Azhar Mahmood said situation deteriorated rapidly and in 2009 the school administration advised the students **t to come in official uniforms of paint shirt after the local Taliban declared wearing it as “haram” and termed it the dress of “**n-believers”.

Then came the order for kids ** longer to walk to and from school and instead be dropped off and picked up by parents, Azhar Mahmood said. Finally, parents were barred from even approaching the Army Public School and instead had to drop them around a mile away from the main gate outside of barricades erected to prevent attacks.

These measures failed to keep them safe and in 2009 two mortars hit his school.Azhar Mahmood said the students luckily remained safe in the attack as the mortars fell at some distance of the classrooms. A year later, his father Sher Bahadur and other family members had ** option but to shift him and his cousins to Peshawar for studies. Initially they accommodated their children in a rented house in Peshawar but Sher Bahadur later quit his job and shifted his family to Peshawar and joined the children.

Azhar Mahmood had trouble adjusting to his new life and has had difficulties making friends.He frequently remembers classmates who also fled the violence.

“I still haven’t seen or heard from my friends Zubair, Israr and Awais,” Azhar Mahmood said. “I wish I could visit my hometown and see my house.” Even the relative safety his family sought in Peshawar has been shattered.

While Miranshah is ** safer, Azhar Mahmood longs for it. He repeatedly asks his father if they’ll ever return home.And Sher Bahadur repeatedly tries to reassure him, saying repeatedly, “Sure, we will!”



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