I hope the govt helps these poor people in fighting these bloody terrorists.
Pakistani village fights Taliban grip on its youth
Pakistani village fights Taliban grip on its youth
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 18, 2010; A10
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – When a suicide bomber drove his truck into a village volleyball game and a crowd of spectators in northwestern Pakistan a little more than two weeks ago, the explosion killed young men from nearly every family in the small, closely knit tribal community.
One of them was the bomber.
The events that led to the New Year’s Day massacre in Shah Hassan Khel, in which more than 100 people died, form a cautionary tale of a community forced to choose between the Taliban and the state, bound by blood ties and centuries of tribal tradition but torn apart by extremist ideology.
The attack was the deadliest act of retaliation to date by extremist Islamist forces against the handful of communities in northwest Pakistan that have tried to resist them. In the past, militants attacked or killed local leaders who formed militias against them – but they had never terrorized an entire village.
Last week, a dozen elders from Shah Hassan Khel described a scene of carnage and panic after the bomb exploded, leaving a huge crater in the playing field and scattering bodies too charred to identify. Each of the men named at least one cousin, nephew or brother who died while playing in or watching the match. They also knew the young suicide attacker, a villager who had run off with the Taliban.
“Every family in our village has lost a relative, but no one is weeping,” said Mushtaq Ahmed, a gaunt farmer with a black goatee who heads the village peace committee, a euphemism for the anti-Taliban militias. “The bomb destroyed our village, but it has not taken away our courage. Once our 40 days of mourning are finished, we will fight and keep fighting as long as a single man is left in the village.”
A slow persuasion
These tough, taciturn men have more than their well-worn Kalashnikov rifles to back up their threat. They are members of a large tribe, the Marwats, whose leaders oppose the Taliban. And like their adversaries, they are ethnic Pashtuns, compelled by tradition to seek an eye for an eye. It remains to be seen whether other communities will draw a different lesson from the massacre and think twice before challenging an enemy that can persuade their own children to kill them.
The New Year’s Day attack has left Shah Hassan Khel in a state of confusion as well as grief. The Islamist extremists who first appeared in the impoverished hamlet two years ago were not an alien enemy force but local men with the same ethnic roots and religion as their neighbors. They talked a few families into supporting them and lured semi-literate youths to their cause with promises of money, power and salvation.
One acolyte was a village schoolteacher’s son named Obaidullah, whose parents had tried to reason with him and finally threw him out of the house. He had not been seen in recent months, but several survivors of the attack said they recognized him at the wheel of the Pajero sport-utility vehicle that roared onto the playing field and exploded. Others said they also spotted a youth named Farzand, the nephew of a local Taliban leader.
The village elders were at a loss to explain how the young men, barely out of their teens, could have turned so violently against their own community. But they described a slow process of persuasion and intimidation by the Taliban leaders who came to their area two years ago.
“When they first came to us, they said they wanted to bring a true Islamic system, and they caused no trouble,” Ahmed said. “They were talking to our boys and giving them money. After some time, they began bothering our female teachers and objecting to the ladies who did vaccinations. Then they started kidnappings and other crimes, and some of our boys went with them. They destroyed our peaceful environment.”
Shah Hassan Khel is in the buffer district of Lakki Marwat, between Pakistan proper and the lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan where the Taliban is fighting the Pakistani army. Until early last year, Marwat leaders kept the militants at bay by holding a mass negotiation session, or jirga, in which they threatened to unleash thousands of militiamen unless the Taliban behaved peacefully in their district.
“We made it abundantly clear we would not allow them to carry out operations from our area,” said Anwar Kamal Marwat, the tribe’s chieftain, who keeps an assortment of heavy weapons in his home and holds a law degree and a seat in Parliament. “I drew a line with a stick, and we made Lakki the safest district in the entire northwest.”
‘We will avenge our loss’
But by last summer, Marwat and local officials said, the agreement had broken down, and Taliban fighters were carrying out brazen attacks in the area. The Marwats called up their regional militia and confronted the militants in repeated battles, killing some and turning over others to the authorities. Still, the militants kept digging into Shah Hassan Khel and other villages.
Finally, last fall, army officials ordered villagers to drive out the local Taliban forces and their sympathizers or step aside. The community was evacuated, then bombed. When families returned last winter, they found their cattle dead, their homes damaged and their pro-Taliban neighbors gone.
The volleyball bombing wiped out a generation of Shah Hassan Khel’s youth. Although the provincial chief minister paid condolences during a brief helicopter visit and several hundred government security troops now patrol the area, residents say they have little confidence in them.
Instead, the community has fallen back on its most primitive loyalties and instincts, vowing to get back at the Taliban who preached Islamic virtues to its susceptible youth with cataclysmic results.
“We are Pashtuns, and we will avenge our loss,” vowed Ahmed, as the other elders cradled their hand-decorated rifles and nodded assent. After the bombing, he said, "we tried to console the wounded and dying. We told them, ‘Don’t cry. This is a gift from God, and it will give us more strength to fight.’ "