HAJJI KARIM and his extended family of 70 were camped in a dirt-floor stable 10 miles outside Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. It was as far as they could get from the Swat valley, where thousands are fleeing from the ravages of the Taliban and the prospect of war with government forces.
When Taliban fighters first entered Karim’s village last month, he recounts, they said they had come to bring peace and Islamic sharia law. But the next day, two of the fighters dragged a policeman out of his truck and tried to slit his throat.
Horrified, a crowd rushed over, shouting and trying to shield the officer. The fighters let him go, but the incident confirmed the villagers’ worst suspicions.
“We all said to each other, what sort of people have come here? And what kind of sharia is this? Cutting off people’s heads has nothing to do with Islam,” says Karim (55), a bus driver. “The people were filled with great rage, and great fear.”
Authorities in the North West Frontier province say that, with the conflict intensifying, they expect half a million people to flee the once-bucolic Swat region near the Afghan border, much of which is now occupied by heavily armed militants.
Officials announced on Tuesday that they plan to open six refugee camps in the safer nearby districts of Swabi and Mardan but, until then, many who leave home to escape the violence are facing the arduous task of finding their own shelter.
As the refugees begin streaming out of Swat and the neighbouring Buner district in northwest Pakistan, they carry with them memories of the indignities and horrors inflicted by occupying Taliban forces – from locking women inside their homes to setting donkeys on fire – as they tried to force residents to accept a radical version of Islam.
The government has not helped, refugees say, with its erratic, seesawing efforts to both appease and fight the militants. Some say they felt confused and trapped, unsure whether to trust the peace deal forged by the government and Taliban leaders last month, or to flee in anticipation of the fighting that has now begun as the peace accord collapses.
Sher Mohammed, a property dealer from Mingora, the main town in Swat, was one of the first people to reach a new refugee camp in the Mardan district with his wife and children on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, he kicked the dirt outside their tent despondently, saying that after enduring two years of fighting and Taliban abuses, he had had enough.
“I feel like I have lost my mind,” he said. “I work hard to make a respectable life and educate my children. Now we are living in a camp, and my sons are talking of guns.”
Mohammed said he did not understand why the country’s powerful army had not been able to defeat the militants before they took over the valley.
The Taliban has repeatedly rejected government overtures to salvage the peace deal, in which the militants agreed to disarm if sharia courts were made the exclusive form of justice in Swat.
Several people who have fled from Buner to the provincial capital of Peshawar, or who were reached in Buner by cellphone, said that the situation was dire and that Taliban forces were still occupying many homes,
They said Buneris were especially vulnerable to Taliban attacks for several reasons. The district is famous for its Sufi shrines, where people practise a mystical form of Islam that is anathema to the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban.
In addition, residents formed militias to resist the Taliban last year, and one village paid dearly for its defiance when voting stations were bombed in December, killing 42 people.
“When the militants entered our area, the people held a jerga to discuss what to do. They said they would never accept them and vowed to fight to the death,” said Sirmir Khan, director of an educational charity in Buner, who fled to Peshawar last week after Taliban forces occupied his offices. “They are not Muslims. They are criminals who are defaming our religion, and the people of Buner are not their friends.”
Afsar Khan, the mayor of a town in Buner who had also fled to Peshawar recently, said that the militants had burned many houses and fields in his area and that, last year, he had joined an armed posse that attempted to drive them out.
In a relief agency office in Islamabad on Wednesday, two teenage sisters from Buner huddled on a flour sack next to a few cooking pots, covering their faces with veils.
They said they had fled their village four days ago after their father, a farm labourer, was warned by his landlord that the Taliban was coming.
“I don’t know what the Taliban are, but everyone was very afraid,” said one of the girls, who gave her name as Abzanan.
“I am very worried because my father went back to get my brothers, and we don’t know what happened to him.” – (LA Times-Washington Post)