Manzoor Pashteen, a leader of the the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, addresses a rally in Lahore on April 22, 2018. Credit: Khalid Mahmood/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Apr 26 2018 (IPS)

“If I’m assured that my home and my village has been de-mined, I’d be the first to return with my family,” says 54-year old Mohammad Mumtaz Khan.

Khan lived in the mountainous village of Patwelai in South Waziristan, a rugged territory in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the Afghan border, one of the world’s most important geopolitical regions. In 2008, he shifted to Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province with his wife and six children.

They had to leave Patwelai hurriedly, “with just the clothes on our backs”, after the Pakistan army decided to launch a major ground-air offensive to cleanse the entire area of the Taliban.

Mumtaz Khan lost his foot to a landmine in his home. Credit: Khan family

Since then, the military carried out a series of intermittent operations across FATA till 2016, when they claimed they had destroyed the Pakistani Taliban’s infrastructure in the country.

That same year, in 2016, the army gave the internally displaced persons (IDPs) — over half a million — a clean chit to return to their homes. Feeling lucky, Khan and a few dozen men decided to visit their village and assess the situation before returning with their families.

It was while he was entering his home through a window that he accidentally stepped on a landmine. “There was a boom and before I could fathom what had happened, I saw my bloodied left foot,” Khan said.

“I am lucky that I got away with a small injury. It may not be so the next time around,” he said, adding that the mountains and valleys are “teeming” with improvised explosive devices (IED) and explosive remnants of war (ERW).

“Despite having cleared the area of militants, it is not possible for many to move about freely as the place remains infested with landmines,” agreed Raza Shah, who heads the Sustainable Peace and Development Organization (SPADO), an active member of the global Control Arms Coalition and International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). Since 2010, SPADO has been blocked from working in FATA.

After the demand by the Pashtuns earlier this year during their long march to Islamabad, the authorities promised they would start de-mining the area.

Not everyone is convinced, especially since the accidents continue. “It is not just a daunting task, but a painstaking, expensive, and risky one and the government is neither equipped with the technology nor does it have the huge human resources needed to comb the vast area,” said Gohar Mehsud, a journalist from the area who has covered the issues of the FATA extensively.

“The military should have cleared the area of mines before letting the tribes return,” said Mohsin Dawar, one of the people behind the newly formed Pashtun Tahafuz Movement which is day by day gaining strength. He pointed out that among their demands was to ask the military to send more teams of bomb disposal units to comb the area and clear the place.

Recalling his tragedy, Khan narrated that he was carried down the mountain to the main road on his nephew’s back for a good two hours, all while bleeding profusely. Once they reached the road, he was tied onto a motorbike and taken to the nearest health centre where he was administered basic first aid. “All I remember was the excruciating pain I felt throughout the journey that seemed never-ending,” he said.

Meanwhile, another cousin had arranged a car to take him to the nearest hospital in D.I. Khan. All in all, the journey took a good nine hours before he reached the hospital.

His injury, like those faced every day by countless others residing in the area, highlights a problem that this conflict has left behind. It also shows an utter disregard for civilian life. Dawar calls it nothing but “criminal negligence” on the part of the Pakistani army.

According to Mehsud, the bombs may have been laid during the conflict by both the army and the terrorists. He discovered a landmine in his house a couple of years back after his family returned to their village in South Waziristan.

“We have been after the army personnel to send someone to defuse the bomb but so far nothing has been done,” he said. For now they have placed stones around it and continually remind their family members not to step anywhere near it.

According to a SPADO spokesperson, the area along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan is heavily mined. “But that area is also heavily fenced with no civilian access; it is marked too.”

The scattered cases of injuries and casualties have occurred only because the mines may have slipped from their position due to rain. On the other hand, in FATA, the landmines are used as an offensive not a defensive weapon by both the military and the militants and are therefore unmarked. “They are even found inside school compounds, homes, and agriculture fields,” said Shah of SPADO.

“I don’t care who planted these bombs; the military carried out the operation in our territory and I hold them responsible for clearing it,” said Dawar.

Shah agreed that mine clearance was the responsibility of the military corps of engineers. He fails to understand why, if the bomb disposal units were so good and sent on missions abroad to clear mines, why not make their own country safe first.

He added that if the military initiated a full-throttle de-mining, it would be the easiest way to win the hearts and mind of the tribal people. “They will gain confidence that the army is there to protect their children,” he said.

“The army has started to cover some ground in South Waziristan, but it needs to be more proactive and engaged and begin this in earnest in the rest of the agencies,” said Mona Naseer, co-founder of Khor Network of tribal women, who belongs to Orakzai agency where a kid was recently injured by stepping on a mine and fatally injured.

These injuries come with a life-long economic cost. For the last two years, Khan has undertaken cumbersome travel  from D.I. Khan to bigger cities like Peshawar and even down to Rawalpindi, in the Punjab province, from one doctor to another, each giving their own opinions. “I have spent over one million rupees on my leg, but still walk with the help of crutches,” he points out helplessly.

Along with losing his limb, his job, and his home, Khan has lost the purpose of his existence. His life, he said, has changed completely. “I’m now a  cripple, imprisoned at home and dependent on others for help. I cannot ride a motorbike, cannot go to the market, have to ask others to help me in the bathroom…everything that I should be doing myself.” Khan doubted he would ever manage to go back to his village given the rugged mountainous terrain that it is located in. The former school teacher is now limited to tutoring students at home.

Pakistan is not the only country facing a landmine problem. While it is impossible to get an accurate number of the total global area contaminated by landmines due to lack of data, landmine watch groups estimate that there could be 110 million landmines in the ground and an equal number in stockpiles waiting to be planted or destroyed. The cost to remove them all is 50 to 100 billion dollars.

According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines network, more than 4,200 people, of whom 42 per cent are children, fall victim to landmines and ERWs annually in many of the countries affected by war or in post-conflict situations around the world.

A global Mine Ban Treaty known as the Ottawa Convention (which became international law in 1999) has been signed and ratified by 162 countries. It prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Sadly, Pakistan is among the countries (United States, China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Russia) that have have not signed the treaty and is among both the producers and users of landmines.

In  2016, the Landmine Monitor report placed India as the third biggest stockpiler of APLs in 2015 after Russia and Pakistan.

Last year, Sri Lanka acceded to the Antipersonnel Mine Ban Convention and set a deadline to be free of landmines by 2020. “Sri Lanka’s accession should spur other nations that haven’t joined the landmine treaty to take another look at why they want to be associated with such an obsolete, abhorrent weapon,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch and chair of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines – the group effort behind the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

But Shah said that unless India agreed to accede, Pakistan will not take the first step. “Perhaps the way to go about it is to bring the issue on the agenda during peace negotiations and when talks around confidence building measures take place between the two countries,” he said.

SPADO is also the official contact point of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC). It openly advocates for the universalization of the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Along with FATA, accidents due to landmines are happening in other places in Pakistan. In 2017, according to SPADO, among the 316 injuries and 153 deaths in total, Pakistan-administered Kashmir recorded seven; Balochistan province 171; FATA 230; and KPK 61.

A majority of the injured and dead were men who were found either driving, fetching water, taking livestock for grazing, rescuing others who had stepped on a bomb, passing by etc. Children were usually playing outside when they chanced upon a shiny object, like a “disc-shaped shoe polish box” hidden in the grass which they attempted to pick  up.

“The figures that SPADO has collected  includes only those that were reported in the media and are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shah emphasized.

He said there was an urgent need for a national registry where such a record is kept and a more comprehensive rehabilitation programme is instituted.

“Taking care of the injured and maimed is expensive and long term,” he said, noting that when the victim is a child, for example, he or she will grow and require new prosthetic limbs. “While the army takes care of its own, unfortunately, there are very few institutes where civilians can go and seek help,” he said.

Journalists in Peshawar protest an attack on Dawn News near the Peshawar Press Club in November 2016. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jan 30 2017 (IPS)

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas located on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border remain one of the most perilous places in the world to be a reporter, with journalists walking a razor’s edge of violence and censorship.

FATA has been a bastion of Taliban militants since they crossed over to Pakistan and took refuge when their government was toppled in neighbouring Afghanistan by the U.S.-led Coalition forces towards the end of 2001.“Most of the 200 reporters from FATA have migrated outside their districts and do their work from safer places. We are unsafe. There’s no protection at all.” --Muhammad Ghaffar

Militants have used the area as a base to target security forces as well as journalists whom they perceive as pro-government.

Muhammad Anwar, who represents FATA-based Tribal Union of Journalists (TUJ), said that excessive violence, threats and intimidation remain a fact of life.

“There are two options with FATA’s journalists: either to face death or stay silent over what is going on there,” he said.

Hayatullah Khan was the first journalist killed, in June 2006 after being kidnapped in December 2005 in Waziristan. Since then more than 20 journalists have been killed in the seven agencies of FATA, allegedly by Taliban militants who were unhappy over their reporting.

“Taliban militants set on fire a newspaper stall when they saw news highlighting their activities. They also warned the reporters to stay away from coverage of the Taliban’s punishments of local people,” Muhammad Shakoor, a journalist from North Waziristan, told IPS.

Shakoor, who now lives in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of Pakistan’s four provinces, recalls how militants’ threats have prompted many journalists to flee to other parts of the country.

The situation in Swat district in KP also turned sour for journalists during the unlawful rule of the Taliban from 2007 to 2009. “Taliban militants intimidated local journalists. At least three of them were killed because they were disliked by the Taliban militants or the Pakistan Army,” Muhammad Rafiq, a local journalist, told IPS.

Reporters fear for their lives and take extreme caution while filing their stories. “We are stuck between militants and the army. We don’t know about the killers of our colleagues who have fallen in the line of their duties,” Rafiq said.

The Taliban may have disappeared as a result of military operations, but they still have the capability to target journalists, he said.

“Most of the 200 reporters from FATA have migrated outside their districts and do their work from safer places. We are unsafe. There’s no protection at all,” Muhammad Ghaffar said.

Ghaffar, who works with an Urdu newspaper in Mohmand Agency, said that it’s not only insurgents. They also face threats from the local political administration who wants them to toe the line.

“It is almost impossible to do independent reporting due to lack of protection. Journalists are surrounded by a host of problems, due to which they have to remain careful,” he said.

Journalists in Pakistan are targeted from “all sides” even as the conditions for media in the country improved slightly.

“Journalists are targeted by extremist groups, militant organisations and state organisations,” says a new report on press freedom by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The report, released early in January, showed that Pakistan had jumped 12 spots to 147 in RSF’s in 2016 World Press Freedom Index, up from 159 in 2015 and 158 in 2014.

Pakistan stands at number two in the international index of the most dangerous places for journalists, who face harassment, kidnappings and assassinations, RSF said. During the last 10 years, more than 100 journalists have been killed in Pakistan, with almost 98 per cent belonging to FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan province.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists has demanded that the government file cases or reopen old investigations into dozens of murdered journalists but there has so far been no action.

Last year, the International Federation of Journalists reported that Pakistan was amongst the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with 102 journalists and media workers having lost their lives since 2005.

The IFJ’s report said that since 2010 alone, 73 journalists and media workers have been killed — almost one journalist every month. It termed Balochistan province a ‘Cemetery for Journalists’, where 31 journalists were killed since 2007.

“The armed insurgency and sectarian violence account for a number of these killings but many of them raise suspicions of the involvement of the state’s institutions,” it said.

The killers of journalists mostly walk free, as Pakistan has so far recorded only three convictions.

Mar. 16, 2016 marked a rare occasion for journalists in Pakistan to celebrate the third verdict convicting a murderer of journalist when a district court in KP sentenced a man named Aminullah to life imprisonment for the killing of journalist Ayub Khattak on Oct. 11, 2013 for his reporting on the drug trade, in which Aminullah was involved.

In March 2016, senior journalist Hamid Mir was targeted by unknown assailants who inflicted grievous injuries. The attackers were never found.

Mir, who later received the “Most Resilient Journalist” award by International Free Press in Holland in November, said he escaped the assassination attempt but wouldn’t leave Pakistan because people stood behind him. He dedicated his award to the people of Pakistan for showing bravery against militancy and terrorism.

“The award is recognition of my sacrifices for advancement of journalism, which encourages me,” he said.

An elderly displaced man carries a sack of rations on his shoulder in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

A doctor shakes his head in despair as he examines a 10-year-old child at the Jalozai refugee camp, about 35 km by road from Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

“He is severely malnourished,” Dr. Zeeshan Khan tells IPS. “He is vulnerable to diseases like diarrhoea, and other infections.”

“Back home we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars." -- Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency in northern Pakistan
Identifying the problem is about all the doctor can do. In this camp, there are too many refugees and too little food. Until that situation changes, kids like little Ahmed Ali will continue to feel the pangs of hunger, and the creeping fear of illnesses that his body is too weak to fight off.

Ali came to Jalozai with his family last year, when Operation Khyber-1, a government-led military offensive in their native Khyber Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), forced thousands to flee for their lives.

Ali, together with his parents and siblings, has now joined the ranks of some three million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Pakistan, forced out of their towns and villages over the course of a decade: first by militant groups operating in this remote tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, and – more recently – by Pakistan’s armed forces, as they carry out a determined campaign against designated terrorist groups in the area.

One such offensive code-named Operation Zarb-e-Azab began last June, with the military focusing its firepower on the 11,585-square-km North Waziristan Agency where militants have operated with impunity since crossing over the Afghan border in 2001.

Launched in response to the deadly June 2014 terror attack on the Karachi International Airport, the operation has been hardest on civilians.

An estimated 900,000 people were displaced last year, nearly all of whom took refuge in Bannu, an ancient city of the KP province where ‘tent cities’ were erected to house some 90,000 families.

Each fresh wave of displacement has put more pressure on the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to feed, heal and shelter thousands of newly uprooted citizens, while simultaneously tending to some 2.1 million ‘permanent’ refugees who have fled the various agencies of FATA since the Taliban and other militant groups claimed the region as a base of operations in 2001.

Meeting the needs of such an enormous refugee population has put tremendous strain on the government.

Provincial Disaster Management Authority Spokesman Adil Khan says that each family receives a monthly allocation of 90 kg of wheat, one kg of tea leaves, five kg of sugar, two kg of rice and two litres of oil in order to alleviate extreme hunger.

But most households IPS spoke with, in camps across the northern province, say this isn’t enough for families comprised, on average, of 10 or more people.

In Bannu, for instance, there are still 454,000 displaced persons, despite robust efforts to relocate families or unite them with their relatives in the area. According to the director-general of health for the KP province, Pervez Kamal, more than 15 percent of the remaining IDPs were malnourished as of January 2015.

“The foodstuffs we get aren’t sufficient to feed my 10-member family,” says Darwaish Gul, a former resident of FATA’s Bajuar Agency, who now resides in a camp in Bannu.

“Back home, we were farmers, growing our own food,” the 60-year-old refugee tells IPS. “We always had enough grain, vegetables and fruits. Now, we have only one meal a day, and always go to sleep hungry.”

The government has refuted such claims, insisting that its emergency aid and food rations are sufficient to feed every hungry mouth in the camps.

But a United Nations report released in the summer of 2014 pointed out that 31 percent of IDPs didn’t receive relief supplies or food items since they lacked computerised national identity cards.

Army officers stand opposite displaced families as they collect their monthly allocation of food supplies in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Of the refugees who arrived from North Waziristan alone, over 15 percent did not qualify for food aid. These included displaced families who had no male members (seven percent), families headed by children (four percent) and families headed by people with disabilities, or elderly persons (five percent).

The situation was compounded by the fact that many of the displaced from North Waziristan trekked for miles in 45-degree Celsius heat to reach Bannu. Scores collapsed along the way, and those who made it safely were severely malnourished, dehydrated or otherwise weakened by the journey.

With limited food and medical supplies, thousands have not fully recovered from the ordeal. They are in need of specialised care, but only the most basic services exist to meet their many needs.

Iqbal Afridi, the FATA representative of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), an opposition political party, tells IPS that the situation is “extremely precarious”, with scores of families either experiencing, or on the verge of, hunger.

He runs an association of affected people, and last November he led a contingent of IDPs from Bara, a township in the Khyber Agency, to the Peshawar Press Club to protest – among other things – the lack of medical supplies, inadequate food rations for the displaced, and miserable – if not non-existent – water and sanitation facilities, which has enabled the spread of diseases.

Others say they just want to expedite government clearance from the camps so they can return to their homes. Nearly every week, groups of IDPs protest in Peshawar, either through marches or sit-ins, always condemning the lack of resources allocated to their basic survival.

“We have been demanding early repatriation to our ancestral homes as our lives have become miserable,” Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency now living in a camp in KP, tells IPS. “We left our home for the sake of peace but peace is still elusive.

“Back home, we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars,” he contends.

IDPs in northern Pakistan wait in line for rations at a refugee camp in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Some experts say a health crisis is not far off. Jawadullah Khan, a doctor who has worked extensively with refugees in the Bannu and elsewhere, tells IPS that people here are badly in need of balanced diets, and clean water.

“We have been trying our level best to provide the best healthcare facilities to the displaced population as they are more vulnerable to diseases,” he says.

In Jalozai refugee camp, which houses families from five out of FATA’s seven tribal agencies, Ahmed Ali has finished with the doctor and is walking back to his tent. Until the government of Pakistan comes up with a national strategy to deal with its displaced population, this little boy will have no respite from hunger.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Afghan widows and orphans in Pakistan have few livelihood options, but a women’s charity is teaching them basic embroidery and sewing to help them start home-based businesses. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 12 2015 (IPS)

At 46, Naseema Nashad is starting her life over, not out of choice but out of necessity. The Afghan woman was just 25 years old when Taliban militants stormed Kabul and her family was forced to flee to neighbouring Pakistan to escape what they knew would be a brutal regime.

“My father stayed back to run his small business there and he would send us money on a monthly basis,” she told IPS. “We used it to feed our seven-member family, and pay rent on our house in Peshawar [capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkwa province].”

“The worst victims of the three-decade-long conflict are women, who have lost their fathers, husbands and male family members [and] are finding it hard to earn a living." -- Ahmed Rasool, professor of international relations at Kabul University
But in 1999, “for no reason” she says, the Taliban killed Nashad’s father. Since then, it has been a daily struggle for the family to survive. Aged 12, 14 and 15, her three brothers quickly found work in local hotels, though they were paid paltry salaries for their labour.

Nashad, on the other hand, could never land anything but odd jobs, which barely gave her enough to survive. What she needed was something fulltime, ideally work she could do from home, that would bring her a regular income.

It was a pipe dream at first, but thanks to the efforts of a vocational centre established by the Afghan Women Organisation, an NGO based in this border city, she is close to making it a reality.

“Now, I have learnt stitching and embroidery and will open a home-based shop very soon. Some of the women who have previously been trained at the centre are helping me,” she added.

She is one of thousands of women, all from war-affected families, who have acquired embroidery and sewing skills over the past five years.

Each woman has her own unique story. Fourteen-year-old Gul Pari, for instance, migrated to Peshawar from Afghanistan seven years ago. As a daily wage-labourer, her father could scarcely make ends meet. There was little choice but for his young daughters to go out in search of work.

Today, Gul and her younger sister Jamila are the owners of a small home-based business, where they take on clients who need garments stitched or altered. They still in a simple mud hut, but at least they now make enough money to comfortably feed the entire family.

Safoora Stanikzai, who heads the Afghan Women Organisation, says she has imparted skills to about 4,000 women since establishing the centre in 2010.

“A majority of the trained women were either widows or orphaned children who had lost their male family members in Afghanistan and were facing severe economic problems here,” Stanikzai tells IPS.

The organisation lacks space and sufficient resources but soldiers on with the little it has. After the women complete their training, they even receive a sewing machine from the centre to facilitate home-based enterprises.

Stanikzai also recruits women found begging on the streets and in marketplaces, and offers them the chance to start their lives afresh – a rare opportunity in this war-torn region, where civilians are often caught between militants and the military, and a massive number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) jostle for space with a resident population already battling a scarcity of homes, jobs and food.

Female Afghan refugees face double-dependency

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, Pakistan is home to 1.6 million ‘legal’ Afghan residents, while an estimated two to three million undocumented refugees are also believed to have crossed the 2,700-km-long border since the 1979 Soviet invasion.

Passing easily through various unguarded or unchecked entry points in the mountains that form a rocky border between the two nations, Afghans fleeing the war were once welcomed by their brethren in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and what was formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province, now called KP.

But when the U.S.-invasion of Afghanistan pushed former Taliban militants into the mountains, leading to a rise in armed groups operating with impunity in the tribal belt, the hand of friendship was snatched away and many Afghans now live on the margins, blamed for the rise in militancy and soaring crime in Pakistan’s northern regions.

According to Ahmed Rasool, a professor of international relations at Kabul University, poverty-stricken Afghan refugees have no choice but to remain in Pakistan since they have little to no economic opportunity back home.

“The worst victims of the three-decade-long conflict are women, who have lost their fathers, husbands and male family members [and] are finding it hard to earn a living,” he told IPS.

Some of these widows and orphans are new arrivals, joining the wave that fled Afghanistan in 2001. Others have lived here much longer, and consider Pakistan their home.

But aid that was once was abundant has dwindled. International NGOs and aid agencies followed closely on the heels of departing foreign troops, leaving Afghan refugees in the lurch.

Barely able to meet the needs of its own impoverished population in the north, the Pakistan government has offered little assistance to visitors who are now being told they have outstayed their welcome.

So initiatives like Stanikzai’s vocational centre represent a welcome oasis in an increasingly hostile desert.

Some Afghan women earn as much as 150 dollars per month by altering or stitching women’s garments. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Women like 49-year-old Shamin Ara, who received training at the centre five years ago, is just one of the organisation’s many success stories.

She arrived in Pakistan in 1992, and lost her father to tuberculosis six years ago. His death left the family no choice but to seek alms from their rich relatives, she tells IPS.

Now she earns about 150 dollars a month by practicing the skills she learned at the centre. It is a decent wage in a country where the average annual income is 1,250 dollars.

She says she has not yet been able to find a husband, since she still lives in abject poverty. But at least now she can feed her four siblings, and harbours dreams of expanding her business further.

Already she has helped five other Afghan women set up their own shops, and hopes to do more for those like herself, who just need a helping hand.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Afghan refugees in Pakistan number some three million. Most crossed the border in 1979 during the Soviet invasion and have lived in Pakistan for generations. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 1 2015 (IPS)

They number between two and three million; some have lived in makeshift shelters for just a few months, while others have roots that stretch much further back into history. Most fled to escape war, others simply ran away from joblessness.

Whatever their reasons for being here, Afghan refugees in Pakistan all now face a similar plight: of being caught up in the dragnet that is sweeping through the country with the stated goal of removing ‘illegal’ residents from this South Asian nation of 180 million people.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), some 1.6 million Afghans are legally residing in Pakistan, having been granted proof of registration (PoR) by the U.N. body. Twice that number is believed to be unlawfully dwelling here, primarily in the northern, tribal belt that borders Afghanistan.

“Forced repatriation will expose us to many problems." -- Gul Jamal, an elderly Afghan refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan
Most arrived during the Soviet invasion of 1979, the chaos of war squeezing millions of Afghans out of their embattled nation and over the mountainous border that stretches for some 2,700 km along rocky terrain.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and what was then known as the North-West Frontier Province, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), offered an easy point of assimilation, the shared language of Pashto bridging the divide between ethnic Pashtun Afghans and the majority Punjabi population.

But what began as a warm welcome has turned progressively sour over the decades, as Afghans are increasingly blamed for rising crime, unemployment and persistent militancy in the region.

The Dec. 16 terrorist attack on a school in the KP’s capital Peshawar – which killed 132 children – has only added fuel to a fiery debate on the status of Afghan refugees, who are accused of swelling the ranks of the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militant groups operating with impunity in the tribal areas.

Three days after the massacre, on Dec. 19, KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak convened an emergency cabinet meeting to demand the immediate removal of all Afghan refugees, claiming that the grisly attack on the Army Public School was planned in Afghanistan.

His call for repatriation joined a chorus that has been growing steadily louder in northern Pakistan as the average citizen struggles to come to terms with an era of terrorism that has resulted in over 50,000 deaths since 2001, when the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan prompted a second wave of immigration into Pakistan.

A heated national debate eventually resulted in a decision to allow lawful Afghan residents to remain in the country until the end of 2015, at which point plans would be made for their safe return.

A previous plan, which followed on the heels of a Peshawar High Court order to repatriate Afghan refugees by the end of 2013, did not see the light of day, largely as it would have entailed over a billion dollars in international assistance.

Afghans own 10,000 of the 20,000 shops in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and also run a range of informal businesses, such as street stalls where they hawk goods. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Tired of waiting for government action, however, local authorities have taken the law into their own hands by embarking on a major crackdown on Afghan refugees.

“About 80 percent of crimes in KP are committed by Afghans,” alleged KP Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani.

“They are involved in murders and kidnapping for ransom, but they disappear after committing these crimes and we cannot trace them,” he told IPS.

“Therefore we demand that those having PoR be restricted to camps, and those without [their papers] sent home,” added the official, whose province is home to an estimated one million Afghans.

Police Officer Khalid Khan says his force is arresting roughly 100 people each day. “Every house is searched,” he told IPS, adding that even those who live in “posh localities” are being investigated as possible unlawful residents.

Terror and crime are not the only problems for which Afghans are being blamed. Trade and industry experts here claim that illegal ventures established by refugee communities have destroyed local businesses.

According to Ghulam Nabi, vice president of the KP Chamber of Commerce and Industries, Afghans run 10,000 of the estimated 20,000 shops in Peshawar; but since they are not registered residents, they are not subject to the same taxes as Pakistani shop-owners.

He told IPS his department has been “urging” the federal government to repatriate Afghans so locals can continue to do their trade. He also alleged that refugees’ demand for housing has pushed rents to unaffordable prices.

Besides hosting hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, the KP is also saddled with scores of displaced Pakistanis, the most recent influx arriving in the midst of a government military campaign in North Waziristan Agency aimed at rooting out insurgents from their stronghold.

Abdullah Khan, a professor at the University of Peshawar, told IPS that two million displaced Pakistanis from adjacent provinces are now residing in KP, many of them in makeshift ‘tent cities’ erected in the Bannu district.

According to Khan, Afghanistan’s gradual return to democracy has paved the way for safe return for refugees. He, along with other experts and officials, see no further reason for Pakistan to continue to host such a massive international population within its borders – especially with so many domestic issues clamouring to be dealt with.

Former cricket legend Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice) party rules the KP province, has also echoed the demand.

“The government issues 500 Pakistani visas to Afghans at the Torkham border [a major crossing point connecting Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province with FATA] everyday but an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people cross the border daily,” he said on Dec. 18.

“The illegal movement takes place because we don’t have a system to track these people and their activities here,” he added.

In a bid to rectify gaps in the system, police in KP are now blocking cell phones belonging to Afghans and taking steps to regulate the movements of refugees who may be in violation of their visa status.

But many Afghan residents claim the allegations are unfounded, while those who have lived here for generations consider Pakistan their home. Others are simply afraid of what will be waiting for them if they do go back.

Gul Jamal, an Afghan elder, told IPS that while his family was eager to return, the situation back home was “extremely precarious”.

“There are no education or health facilities, and no electricity,” he claimed, adding that job opportunities too are few and far between in Afghanistan.

He hopes the Pakistan government will “take pity” on his people. “Forced repatriation will expose us to many problems,” he explained.

In an interview with IPS on Dec. 22, Federal Minister for States and Frontier Regions Abdul Qadir Baloch categorically stated that legal refugees would stay on until the end of 2015 as per the government’s agreement with UNHCR.

“The registered Afghan refugees have never been found to be involved in terrorism-related incidents in the country and they won’t be sent back against their will,” Baloch stressed.

“The government will protect legal Afghan [immigrants] against forced repatriation,” he asserted.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Sikhs in northern Pakistan are fleeing the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where threats, intimidation and attacks are making life impossible for the religious minority. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Nov 20 2014 (IPS)

Balwan Singh, an 84-year-old shopkeeper living in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is well past retirement age, but any illusions he may have had about living out his golden years in peace and security have long since been dashed.

The elderly man is a member of Pakistan’s 40,000-member Sikh community, which has a long history in this South Asian nation of 182 million people.

“The constitution limits the political rights of Pakistan’s non-Muslims." -- Javid Shah, a Lahore-based lawyer
Though constituting only a tiny minority, Sikhs feel a strong pull towards the country, believed to be the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.

Sikhs have lived on the Afghan-Pakistan border among Pashto-speaking tribes since the 17^th century, but in the last decade the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – once a cradle of safety for Sikhs fleeing religious persecution – have become a hostile, violent, and sometimes deadly place for the religious community.

For many, the situation now is a veritable return to the dark ages of religious persecution.

Today, Balwan is just one of many Sikhs who have abandoned their homes and businesses in FATA and taken refuge in the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

“We are extremely concerned over the safety of our belongings, including properties back home,” Balwan, who now runs a grocery store in KP’s capital, Peshawar, tells IPS.

Balwan is registered here as an Internally Displaced Person (IDP), along with 200,000 others who have left FATA in waves since militant groups began exerting their control over the region in 2001.

Calling Sikhs ‘infidels’, the Taliban and other armed groups set off a wave of hostility towards the community. Shops have been destroyed and several people have been kidnapped. Others have been threatened and forced to pay a tax levied on “non-Muslims” by Islamic groups in the area.

According to police records, eight Sikhs have been killed in the past year and a half alone. When Balwan arrived here in Peshawar, he was one of just 5,000 people seeking safety.

“We want to go back,” he explains, “but the threats from militants hamper our plans.”

Karan Singh, another Sikh originally hailing from Khyber Agency, one of seven agencies that comprise FATA, says that requests to the government to assist with their safe return have fallen on deaf ears.

“Maybe the government doesn’t grant us permission to go back because it doesn’t want to enrage the Taliban,” speculates Karan, also an IDP now living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The 51-year-old, who now runs a medical store in Peshawar, is worried about the slow pace of business. “We earned a good amount from the sale of medicines in Khyber Agency, but we have exhausted all our cash since being displaced.”

Indeed, many Sikhs were business owners, contributing greatly to the economy of northern Pakistan.

Now, hundreds of shops lie abandoned, slowly accumulating a layer of dust and grime from neglect, and scores of Sikhs are reliant on government aid. The average family needs about 500 dollars a month to survive, a far greater sum than the 200-dollar assistance package that currently comes their way.

The situation took a turn for the worse in June of this year, when a government-sponsored offensive in North Waziristan Agency, aimed at rooting out militants once and for all from their stronghold, forced scores of people to flee their homes amidst bombs and shelling.

Some 500 Sikh families were among those escaping to Peshawar. Now, they are living in makeshift camps, unable to earn a living, access medical supplies and facilities or send their children to school.

Male children in particular are vulnerable, easily identifiable by their traditional headdress.

While some families are being moved out and resettled, Sikhs say they are consistently overlooked.

“We have been visiting registration points established by the government to facilitate our repatriation, to no avail,” Karan laments.

Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, president of the Pakistan Christian Congress, says, “About 65 Christian families, 15 Hindu families and 20 Sikh families are yet to be registered at the checkpoint after leaving North Waziristan Agency, which has deprived them of [the chance to access] relief assistance.”

Such discrimination, experts say, is not conducive to a pluralistic society.

According to Muhammad Rafiq, a professor with the history department at the University of Peshawar, Sikhs are the largest religious minority in Pakistan after Hindus and Christians.

Thus the current situation bodes badly for “religious harmony and peaceful coexistence in the country”, he tells IPS.

He says that minorities have to contend not only with the Taliban but also Islamic fundamentalists who regard any non-Muslim as a threat to their religion. By this same logic, Hindus and Christians have faced similar problems: threats, evictions and, sometimes, violent intimidation.

Kidnapping for ransom has also emerged as a major issue, with some 10 Sikhs being kidnapped in the past year alone, prompting many to pack up their belongings and head for cities like Peshawar, says Lahore-based Sardar Bishon Singh, former president of the Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (PSGPC).

Bishon’s shop in Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, was looted in September 2013, but he says the police didn’t even register his report.

“Thieves broke into my shop and took away 80,000 dollars [about eight million rupees] but the Lahore police were reluctant to register a case,” Bishon recalls.

He says the police are afraid, “because the Taliban are involved and the police cannot take action against them [Taliban].”

Some experts say the problem runs deeper than religious persecution in Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas, extending into the very roots of Pakistan’s political system.

“The constitution limits the political rights of Pakistan’s non-Muslims,” says Javid Shah, a Lahore-based lawyer.

“Only Muslims are allowed to become the president or the prime minister. Only Muslims are allowed to serve as judges in the Federal Shariat Court, which has the power to strike down any law deemed un-Islamic.”

He believes these clauses in the constitution have “emboldened” the people of Pakistan to treat minorities as second-class citizens.

This mindset was visible on Aug. 6 when a Sikh trader, Jagmohan Singh, was killed and two others injured in an attack on a marketplace in Peshawar.

“We have no enmity with anyone,” says Pram Singh, who sustained injuries in the attack. “This is all just part of the Taliban’s campaign to eliminate us.”

He alleges that the gunmen, who arrived on a motorbike, did not face any resistance when they rode in to the marketplace. “Police arrived after the gunmen had left the scene,” he adds.

On Mar. 14 this year, two Sikhs were killed in the Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but their killers are yet to be identified, Pram says.

While eyewitness accounts point to negligence on the part of the authorities, some believe that the government is doing its best to address the situation.

Sardar Sooran Singh, a lawmaker in KP, insists that the government is providing security to members of the Sikh community, who he says enjoy equal rights as Muslims citizens.

Peshawar Police Chief Najibullah Khan tells IPS that they have been patrolling markets in the city where Sikh-owned shops might be vulnerable to attack.

“We have also suggested that they avoid venturing out at night, and inform the police about any threat [to their safety],” he says.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A Pakistani child receives a dose of the oral polio vaccine (OPV). According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for 80 percent of polio cases worldwide. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By IPS Correspondents
KATHMANDU/PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 24 2014 (IPS)

The goal is an ambitious one – to deliver a polio-free world by 2018. Towards this end, the multi-sector Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is bringing out the big guns, sparing no expense to ensure that “every last child” is immunised against the crippling disease.

Home to 1.8 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world’s population, Southeast Asia was declared polio-free earlier this year, its 11 countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste – joining the ranks of those nations that live without the polio burden.

United in the goal of eradicating polio, an infectious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can result in paralysis within hours, governments across the region worked hand in hand with community workers, NGOs and advocates to make the dream a reality.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of polio cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide." -- Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan
According to GPEI, immunisation drives reached some 7.5 billion children over the course of 17 years, not just in city centres but also in remote rural outposts. During that time, the region witnessed some 189 nationwide campaigns that delivered over 13 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

High-performing countries like Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bhutan eradicated polio a decade-and-a-half ago while India, once considered a stubborn hotbed for the disease, clocked its last case in January 2011, thus bringing about the much-awaited regional ‘polio-free’ tag.

But further north, dark clouds in the shapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan blight Asia’s happy tale. Together with Nigeria, these two nations are blocking global efforts to mark 2018 as polio’s last year on this planet.

Celebrating success from Nepal to the Philippines

For countries like Nepal, home to 27 million people, the prevalence of polio in other nations in the Asian region threatens its hard-won gains in stamping out the disease.

“There’s always fear that polio may see a resurgence as the disease hasn’t been eradicated everywhere,” said Shyam Raj Upreti, chief of the immunisation section of Nepal’s child health division (CDH).

Anxious to hold on to the coveted polio-free status, Nepal recently introduced the inactivated injectable polio vaccine (IPV) into its routine immunisation programme, the first country in South Asia to do so.

“While the oral polio vaccine has been the primary tool in polio eradication efforts, new evidence shows that adding one dose of IPV – given to children of 14 weeks by intramuscular injection – to the OPV [schedule], will maximise immunity to poliovirus,” Upreti explained.

He credits his country’s success to a high degree of social acceptance of the importance of child health in overall national development. “Female health volunteers play a key role in making the community understand why immunisation is important,” he said, adding that these volunteers provide services to some of the poorest segments of the population.

Between 1984 and 2011, Nepal’s immunisation coverage more than doubled from 44 to 90 percent. Ashish KC, child health specialist at UNICEF-Nepal, said that immunisation programmes didn’t stop even during the ‘people’s war’, a brutal conflict between the Maoists and the Nepali state that lasted a decade and killed 13,000 people.

“We understood that [we] needed a multi-sector approach, so service delivery was decentralised, and access was made easier,” KC told IPS. “Immunisation went beyond health, it became a part of [our] development plans.”

Such a mindset is also apparent in the Philippines, where the government recently decided to include the IPV into its national health plan, making it the largest developing country to do so.

According to a press release by Sanofi Pasteur, the multinational pharmaceutical company working closely with the Philippine government on its eradication initiatives, many Filipinos feel deeply about polio, having had a prime minister who was a survivor of the disease and lived with lifelong disabilities as a result.

“What’s striking about the Philippines is how strong a partnership there is around vaccinations,” said Mike Watson, vice president of vaccinations and advocacy at Sanofi Pasteur, referring to the unprecedented support shown by government officials and civil society at an event in Manila earlier this month that ended with several children receiving the IPV, the first of some two million children who will now be vaccinated every year.

“Getting the vaccine out to distribution centres on the smaller islands obviously poses a logistical challenge, but the Philippines has proven it’s really good at that,” Watson told IPS.

He added that strong networks of community health workers have enabled the Philippines to move into the “endgame”, the last stage in global eradication efforts that will require the 120 countries that aren’t currently using the IPV to introduce it by the end of 2016, representing one of the biggest and fastest vaccine introductions in history.

Over 5,700 km away from the Philippines, however, lives the lingering threat of polio, with thousands of children still at risk, and hundreds suffering from the debilitating results of the disease.

Pakistan’s polio troubles

This past June, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended a travel ban on all those leaving Pakistan without proof of immunisation, in a bid to prevent the spread of polio outside the country’s troubled borders.

But absent swift political action, travel bans alone will not staunch the epidemic.

A 2012 Taliban-imposed ban on the OPV has effectively prevented over 800,000 children from being immunised in two years, health officials told IPS.

In 2014 alone, Pakistan has recorded 206 cases of paralysis due to wild poliovirus, the most savage strain of the disease. Last week, 19 new cases of this strain were brought to the attention of the authorities.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide,” Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan, told IPS.

The situation is most severe in the northern tribal areas, where the Taliban has used both violence and terror to spread the message that OPV is a ploy by Western governments to sterilise the Muslim population.

“The militancy-racked Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) accounts for 138 cases, while the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province has 43 cases,” Pervez Kamal, director of health in FATA, told IPS.

North Waziristan Agency has registered 69 cases, while the Khyber Agency and South Waziristan Agency are struggling with 49 and 17 cases respectively.

In a tragic development, an 18-month-old baby girl named Shakira Bibi has become the latest in a long line of polio victims. Her father, Shoiab Shah, told IPS that “Taliban militants” were responsible for depriving his daughter of the OPV.

In an unexpected twist, a military offensive aimed at breaking the Taliban’s hold over northern Pakistan has given health officials rare access to hundreds of thousands of residents in the tribal areas.

With close to a million people from North Waziristan Agency fleeing airstrikes and taking refuge in the neighbouring KP province, community health workers have been delivering the vaccine to residents of displacement camps in cities like Bannu and Lakki Marwat.

Still, this is only a tiny step towards overcoming the crisis.

Altaf Bosan, head of Pakistan’s national vaccination programme, said 34 million children under the age of five are in need of the vaccine but in 2014 alone “about 500,000 children missed their doses due to refusals by parents to [defy] the Taliban’s ban.”

The government has now elicited support from religious leaders to convince parents to submit to the OPV programme.

“Islamic scholars from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt [and] Afghanistan have issued a fatwa [edict], reminding parents that it is their Islamic duty to protect their children against disease,” Maulana Israr ul Haq, one of the signatories, told IPS.

According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for nearly 80 percent of polio cases reported globally, posing a massive threat to worldwide eradication efforts.

Excerpt:

The Taliban have damaged over a thousand schools in northern Pakistan since crossing over from Afghanistan in 2001, preventing scores of children, especially young girls, from receiving an education. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

For girls living in northern Pakistan’s sprawling tribal regions, the struggle for education began long before that fateful day when members of the Taliban shot a 15-year-old schoolgirl in the head, and will undoubtedly continue for many years to come.

Still, the news that Malala Yousafzai – a former resident of the Swat Valley in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province – had received the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 10, brought renewed vigor to those battling the Taliban’s hard-line attitude towards girls’ education.

Residents here told IPS that when she survived an attempt on her life on Oct. 9, 2012, Yousafzai became an icon, a representative of the state of terror that has become a part of everyday existence here.

“We appeal to Malala to spend funds to promote education in FATA." -- Yasmeen Bibi, a 13-year-old refugee who is not attending school.
By awarding her the world’s most prestigious peace prize, experts say, the Nobel Committee is sending a strong message to all who remain trapped in zones where the sanctity of education has been subordinated to the perils of conflict.

Muhammad Shafique, a professor at the University of Peshawar, the KP province’s capital, told IPS that Yousafzai’s prize has turned a “spotlight onto the importance of education.”

“It will be a motivational force for parents to send their daughters back to school,” he added.

Since militants began crossing the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2001, following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, residents of these mountainous areas have endured the full force of extremist campaigns to impose strict Islamic rule over the population.

At the height of the Taliban’s rule over the Swat Valley, between 2007 and 2009, approximately 224 schools were destroyed, stripping over 100,000 children of a decent education.

It was during this period that Yousafzai, just 12 years old at the time, began recording the hardships she faced as a young girl in search of an education, writing regular reports for the Urdu service of the BBC from her hometown of Swat.

Schoolgirls in Peshawar pray for Malala Yousafzai. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Her struggle found echo all around northern Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of young people like herself were living in constant fear of reprisals for daring to pursue their studies.

In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), for instance, Taliban edicts banning secular schools as a “ploy” by the West to undermine Islam have kept 50 percent of school aged children out of the classroom.

Since the decade beginning in 2004, the Taliban have damaged some 750 schools, 422 of them dedicated exclusively to girls, according to a source within the FATA directorate for education.

FATA has one of the lowest enrollment rates in the country, with just 33 percent of school-aged children receiving an education. In total, about 518,000 children in FATA are sitting idle, as per government records.

The dropout rate touched 73 percent between 2007 and 2013, as families fled from one district to another to escape the Taliban. The latest wave of displacement has seen close to one million people from North Waziristan Agency evacuating their homes since Jun. 15 and taking refuge in Bannu, an ancient city in KP.

Schoolgirls at a demonstration in Peshawar in support of Malala Yousafzai. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

A rapid assessment report released by the United Nations in August found that 98.7 percent of displaced girls and 97.9 percent of the boys were not receiving any kind of education in the camps.

Already nursing a miserable primary school enrollment rate of 37 percent, Bannu is on the verge of a full-blown educational crisis, with 80 percent of its school buildings now occupied by refugees.

Thus the honour bestowed upon Yousafzai has touched many thousands of people, and breathed new life into the campaign for the right to education. Since October 2012, enrollment in the Swat Valley has increased by two percent, according to Swat Education Officer Maskeen Khan.

“Now, we are expecting a huge boost after the award,” the official told IPS.

Naila Ahmed, a 10^th-grader originally hailing from North Waziristan Agency who now lives in a refugee camp in Bannu, feels her generation has been “unlucky”, forced to grow up without an education.

The situation is so dire that she views her displacement as a “blessing in disguise”, since the move to Bannu has enabled her to enroll in a private school for the first time in many years.

She is one of the fortunate ones; few parents in this militancy-infested region can afford the cost of private schooling, she says.

Thirteen-year-old Yasmeen Bibi is one of those whose parents cannot shoulder the bill for an education. “We hope that the government will make arrangements for our education,” she told IPS from her makeshift home in a refugee camp in Bannu, adding, “We appeal to Malala to spend funds to promote education in FATA.”

Her words hearken back to the time immediately following Yousafzai’s decision to flee the country, when many from the Swat Valley and its surrounding provinces felt let down by the rising star, left behind to face the Taliban’s wrath stemming from the teenager’s newfound fame.

Some agreed with the Taliban’s claim that she had “abandoned Islam for secularism” by accepting an offer to live and study in the UK.

In the last few days, however, any ill feeling towards Yousafzai, now the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, appears to have dissipated, replaced by a kind of collective euphoria at the global acknowledgement of her courage.

All throughout Swat, girls’ schools distributed free sweets on Oct. 10 and celebrated in the streets.

Yousafzai’s former classmate, Mushatari Bibi, explained that the news has been like “a ray of hope” to other girls, who take a big risk each time they leave their homes to head to school.

Some even say that the Nobel Prize, and the hope it has instilled in the population, represents a challenge to the very foundations of the Taliban’s power, since more people now feel compelled to stand up to the militants that have plagued the lives of millions for well over a decade.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

About 518,000 primary school students have sat idle over the last decade as a result of the Taliban's campaign against secular education. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

Between government efforts to wipe out insurgents from Pakistan’s northern, mountainous regions, and the Taliban’s own campaign to exercise power over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the real victims of this conflict are often invisible.

Walking among the rubble of their old homes, or sitting outside makeshift shelters in refugee camps, thousands of children here are growing up without an education, as schools are either bombed by militants or turned into temporary housing for the displaced.

Schools have been under attack since 2001, when members of the Taliban fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan took refuge across the border in neighbouring Pakistan and began to impose their own law over the residents of these northern regions, including issuing a ban on secular schooling on the grounds that it was “un-Islamic”.

“We don’t want to see these children without an education. They have suffered a great deal at the hands of the Taliban and cannot afford to remain [out of] school any longer." -- Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani
To make matters worse, a military offensive against the Taliban launched on Jun. 18 has forced close to a million civilians to flee their homes in North Waziristan Agency, one of seven districts that comprise FATA, thus disrupting the schooling of thousands of students.

Officials here say the situation is very grave, and must be urgently addressed by the proper authorities.

Over the last decade, the Taliban have damaged some 750 schools in FATA, 422 of them dedicated exclusively to girls, depriving about 50 percent of children in the region of an education, says Ishtiaqullah Khan, deputy director of the FATA directorate for education.

“We will rebuild them once the military action is complete and the Taliban are defeated,” the official tells IPS, though when this will happen remains an unanswered question.

Even prior to the latest wave of displacement, FATA recorded one of the lowest primary school enrolment rates in the country, with just 33 percent of school-aged children in classrooms.

Girls on the whole fared worse than their male counterparts, with a female enrollment rate of just 25 percent, compared to 42 percent for boys.

The period 2007-2013 saw a wave of dropouts, touching 73 percent in 2013, as the Taliban stepped up its activities in the region and families fled in terror to safer areas.

All told, some 518,000 primary school students have sat idle over the last decade, Khan said, citing government records.

In the Bannu district of the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, where most of the displaced from North Waziristan have taken refuge in sprawling IDP camps, the situation is no better.

While the local government struggles to provide basics like food, medicine and shelter, education has fallen on the backburner, and scores of children are losing hope of ever going back to school.

Ahmed Ali, a 49-year-old IDP, had hoped that his daughters, aged five, six and seven years, would be enrolled in temporary schools in the camp in Bannu, but was shattered when he discovered that this was not to be.

“I have no way of ensuring their education,” he lamented to IPS.

A rapid assessment report by the United Nations says that 98.7 percent of displaced girls and 97.9 percent of the boys are not receiving any kind of education in the camps.

This is not only exacerbating the woes of the refugees – who are also suffering from a lack of food, dehydration in 42-degree-Celsius heat, diseases caused by inadequate sanitation, and trauma – but it also threatens to upset the school system for locals in the Bannu district, officials say.

An existing primary school enrollment rate of just 37 percent (31 percent for girls and 43 percent for boys) is likely to worsen, since 80 percent of some 520,000 IDPs are occupying school buildings.

Though schools are currently closed for the summer holiday, the new term is set to begin on Sep. 1. But 45-year-old Hamidullah Wazir, a father of three whose entire family is being housed in a classroom, says few displaced are ready to vacate the premises because they have “no alternatives”.

He recognises that their refusal to leave could adversely affect education for local boys and girls in Bannu, but “until the government provides us proper shelter, we cannot move out of here,” he tells IPS.

Statistics from the department of education indicate there are 1,430 schools in Bannu, of which 48 percent are girls’ schools and 1,159 are primary schools.

Over 80 percent of these institutions are currently occupied by displaced people, of which some 22,178 (43 percent of occupants) are children.

In addition to the IDPs who have flocked here since mid-June, KP is also home to 2.1 million refugees who fled in fear of the Taliban over the last decade.

These families, too, have been struggling for years to educate their children.

“One whole generation has [missed out] on an education due to the Taliban,” Osama Ghazi, a father of four, tells IPS. A shopkeeper by trade, he says that wealthier families moved to KP years ago in search of better opportunities for their families, but not everyone found them.

“We have been asking the government to make arrangements for the education of our children but the request is yet to fell on receptive ears,” Malik Amanullah Khan, a representative of the displaced people, tells IPS.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani says the government is in the process of finding alternatives for displaced children.

“We don’t want to see these children without an education. They have suffered a great deal at the hands of the Taliban and cannot afford to remain [out of] school any longer,” he told IPS, adding that the government, in collaboration with U.N. agencies, aims to provide educational facilities in Bannu free of cost.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Doctors examine internally displaced children from North Waziristan Agency at a free medical clinic in Bannu, a district of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 21 2014 (IPS)

Some fled on foot, others boarded trucks along with luggage, rations and cattle. Many were separated from families, or collapsed from exhaustion along the way. They don’t know where their next meal will come from, or how they will provide for their children.

In the vast refugee camps of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, civilians who fled the Pakistan Army’s military offensive against the Taliban in the country’s northern Waziristan Agency now walk around in a state of delirious confusion.

Medical officials here say that almost all the 870,000 internally displaced people in KP are deeply traumatised by over a decade of war in the northern provinces, where they were caught in the crossfire between government forces and militants who crossed the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2001.

“We examined about 300,000 patients at the psychiatry wards of the KP hospital in 2013; 200,000 of them belonged to FATA. This included 145,000 women and 55,000 children." -- Muhammad Wajid, a psychiatrist at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Teaching Hospital in Peshawar
Now, as the army conducts air raids on the 11,585-square-kilometre North Waziristan Agency in a determined bid to wipe out the Taliban, war-weary civilians are once again bearing the brunt of the conflict, forced to leave their ancestral homes and seek refuge in neighbouring KP where shelter, clean water, food and medical supplies are stretched thin.

IDPs have been streaming in since the military operation began on Jun. 15, reaching close to a million by mid-July, officials here say. So far, aid has come in the form of food rations and medical supplies for the wounded, as well as those left dehydrated by the scorching 45-degree heat.

But very little is being done to address the psychological trauma that affects nearly everyone in these camps.

“The displaced population has been living in rented houses or with relatives where they lack water, sanitation and food due to which they are facing water and food-borne ailments,” Consultant Psychiatrist Dr. Mian Iftikhar Hussain tells IPS. “But the main problems are psychological disorders, which are ‘unseen’.”

Sitting in front of the Iftikhar Psychiatric Hospital in Peshawar, capital of KP and 250 miles from the largest refugee camp in Bannu, 50-year-old Zarsheda Bibi tells IPS her entire family fled Waziristan, leaving everything behind.

Far worse than the loss of her home and possessions, she says, is the loss of her one-year-old grandson, who died on the long and arduous journey to KP.

“She doesn’t sleep properly because she dreams of her deceased grandson every night,” says Iftikhar, who is treating Bibi for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

According to Javid Khan, an official with the National Disaster Management Authority, PTSD is one of the most common ailments among the displaced.

He recounts to IPS his recent interaction with a woman in a camp in Bannu, whose husband was killed by shelling in Miramshah, the headquarters of North Waziristan.

“Now she is completely disoriented and extremely concerned about the future of her three sons and one daughter,” he says, adding that those who were uprooted are sure to develop long as well as short-term disorders as a result of prolonged stress, anxiety and fear.

Other conditions could include de-personalisation, classified by DSM-IV as a dissociative disorder in which a person experiences out-of-body feelings and severe disorientation; as well as de-realisation, an alteration in perceptions of the external world to the point that it appears unreal, or ‘dream-like’.

Experts say that people torn from their native villages, thrust into completely new surroundings and experiencing insecurity on a daily basis are highly susceptible to these types of conditions, which are associated with severe trauma.

Khan says women and children, who comprise 73 percent of IDPs according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), are likely to be disproportionately impacted by PTSD, as well as disorders related to anxiety, stress, panic and depression.

Muhammad Junaid, a psychologist working with the displaced, says that victims are also suffering from poor self-esteem, as they are forced to occupy tents and shacks, in extremely unsanitary conditions.

Mothers are particularly impacted by their inability to provide for their families, he tells IPS, adding that permanent phobias are not uncommon.

Another major concern among health officials here is how the situation will affect children, many of whom are at a very sensitive age.

“From childhood to adolescence, a child passes through dramatic phases of physical and mental development,” Junaid says. “During this transition, they gain their identity, grow physically and establish familial relationships, as well as bonds with their community and society as a whole.”

Ripped from their ancestral homes and traditional communities, he says, this process will be interrupted, resulting in long-term mental conditions unless properly addressed.

Parents are equally worried about what displacement might mean for their children’s education.

“Two of my sons are very good at their studies,” Muhammad Arif, a shopkeeper from Mirali, an administrative division in North Waziristan, confides to IPS. “They would do well in class and get good positions. Now there’s no school and I fear they will not progress with their education.”

Even if they were to return to Waziristan, he says, the future looks bleak, since the army operation has devastated homes, buildings and business establishments. Everything will have to be built back up from scratch before the people can return to a normal life, he laments.

After nearly a month in the camp, Arif’s 10-year-old son Sadiq has all but given up hope. Through tears, he tells IPS that children like him have “no sleep, no play, no education.”

“I don’t know what the future holds for us,” he says.

For long-time health experts in the region, the situation is a frightening climax of a crisis that has been building for years, ever since the army began a crackdown on insurgents in the rugged, mountainous regions of northern Pakistan nearly 12 years ago.

“Around 50 percent of the residents of FATA have suffered psychological problems due to militancy and subsequent military operations,” Muhammad Wajid, a psychiatrist at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Teaching Hospital in Peshawar tells IPS.

“We have examined about 300,000 patients at the psychiatry wards of the KP hospital in 2013; 200,000 of them belonged to FATA. This included 145,000 women and 55,000 children,” he says.

Since 2005, nearly 2.1 million FATA residents have taken refuge in KP, according to Javid, posing a real challenge to the local government, which has struggled to balance the needs of the displaced with its own impoverished local population.

The latest wave of refugees has only added to the government’s woes, and many in the region fear the situation is on a knife’s edge, especially in the holy month of Ramadan, when there is a desperate need for proper sanitation and food to break the daily fast.

(END)

An elderly displaced man carries a sack of rations on his shoulder. The Pakistan Army has distributed 30,000 ration packs of 110 kg each. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 1 2014 (IPS)

Three days ago, Rameela Bibi was the mother of a month-old baby boy. He died in her arms on Jun. 28, of a chest infection that he contracted when the family fled their home in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, where a full-scale military offensive against the Taliban has forced nearly half a million people to flee.

Weeping uncontrollable, Bibi struggles to recount her story.

“My son was born on Jul. 2 in our own home,” the 39-year-old woman tells IPS. “He was healthy and beautiful. If we hadn’t been displaced, he would still be alive today.”

“My wife is expected to deliver a baby within a fortnight, But the doctors say the child will be premature due to the stressful journey we undertook to get here." -- Jalal Akbar, a former resident of the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan Agency
But Bibi does not have the luxury of grieving long for her little boy.

Soon she will have to dry her eyes and begin the grim task of providing for herself and her two young daughters, who now comprise some of the 468,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) seeking refuge from the Pakistan army’s airstrikes on the militant-infested mountainous regions that border Afghanistan.

Launched on Jun. 15, the army’s campaign was partly motivated by terrorist attacks on the Karachi International Airport that killed 18 people in early June.

Having failed since 2005 to flush out the militants from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the army is now focusing all its firepower on the 11,585-square-kilometre North Waziristan Agency, where insurgent groups have enjoyed a veritable free reign since escaping the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan over a decade ago.

Some political pundits are cheering what they call the government’s “hard line” on the terrorists. But what it means for a civilian population already weary from years of war is homeless, hunger and sickness.

Most of the displaced have collapsed, fatigued from hours of travel on dirt roads in 45-degree heat, in massive camps in Bannu, an ancient city in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province.

Already groaning under the weight of nearly a million refugees who have arrived in successive waves over the last nine years, KP is completely unprepared to deal with this latest influx of desperate families.

With tents serving as makeshift shelters, and the blistering summer heat threatening to worsen over the coming weeks, medical professionals here are warning of a full-blown health crisis, as doctors struggle to cope with a long line of patients.

Many traveled for hours on dirt roads, in 45-degree heat, to reach safe ground, with no food or water along the way. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Muslim Shah, a former resident of North Waziristan, has just arrived in Bannu after a 45-km journey on an unpaved road with his wife and children.

He is being treated at a rudimentary ‘clinic’ in the camp for severe dehydration, and recovering from a stomach flu caused by consumption of contaminated water along the way.

The frail-looking man tells IPS he is concerned for his family’s health in an unsanitary environment, gesturing to a nearby filthy canal where his children are bathing amongst a herd of buffalos.

“We have examined about 28,000 displaced people,” Dr. Sabz Ali, deputy medical superintendent at the district headquarters hospital (DHQ) of Bannu, told IPS.

About 25,000 of these, he said, are suffering from preventable diseases caused by sun exposure, lack of nutrition, and consumption of unclean water.

On Jun. 29, the government relaxed its curfew, giving families a tiny window of escape before resuming its operation Monday.

Families who left in the allotted timeframe are expected to descend on Bannu soon, prompting an urgent need for preemptive and coordinated efforts to avert an outbreak of diseases, Ali asserted.

“Given the soaring temperatures, we fear outbreaks of communicable water and vector-borne diseases, like gastroenteritis and diarrhoea, as well as vaccine-preventable childhood diseases such as polio and measles,” he said.

Seeking some relief from the 41-degree heat, displaced children in Bannu join a herd of buffalos for a bath in a filthy canal. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Ahmed Noor Mahsud (59) and his family of four epitomise the unfolding crisis.

Mahsud himself is bed-ridden as a result of a heat stroke caused by walking 40 km in sweltering heat, while his sons – aged 14, 15 and 20 – have been suffering with diarhhoea, fever and headaches since they arrived in the camp on Jun. 22.

The family has had very little access to clean water for nearly a week, which is exacerbating their illness.

According to public health specialists like Ajmal Shah, who was dispatched by the KP health department, exhaustion among IDPs has even led to some cases of cardiac arrest.

Out in the desert, families are also at risk of snake and scorpion bites, and could suffer long-term psychological stress as a result of the trauma, Shah told IPS.

About 90 percent of the displaced are extremely poor, having lived well below the poverty line for over a decade due to the eroding impacts of terrorism on the local economy. Few can afford private care and must wait patiently for thinly-spread doctors to make their rounds.

But for people like 30-year-old Jalal Akbar, a former resident of the town of Mir Ali in Waziristan, patience is almost impossible.

“My wife is expected to deliver a baby within a fortnight,” he told IPS anxiously. “But the doctors say the child will be premature due to the stressful journey we undertook to get here. She requires bed rest, but we have been unable to find a proper home.”

The exhausted man fears their eviction will deprive him of his first child.

Another major crisis looming on the horizon is a food shortage, which will only add to the woes of the displaced.

According to a Jun. 30 assessment report by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “The Pakistan Army has distributed 30,000 ration packs each of 110 kg. The WFP has provided food rations to over 8,000 families while a number of NGOs and charity organisations are also carrying out relief activities.”

Still, those like Ikram Mahsud, a displaced tribal elder, fear that the worst is yet to come.

“We lack good food, and the non-availability of sanitation facilities like latrines, detergent and soap [means] our people are destined to suffer in the coming days,” he told IPS, adding that requests for clean water and sanitation facilities have fallen on deaf ears.

Women and children currently comprise 74 percent of the IDPs, prompting the World Health Organisation (WHO) to point out, in a Jun. 30 report, the urgent need for “mass awareness campaigns among women to promote use of safe drinking water, hygienic food preparation and storage.

“Information regarding benefits of hand-washing before eating and preparation of food, use of impregnated bed nets to avoid mosquitoes’ bites and prevent occurrence of malaria should also be encouraged,” the agency noted.

WHO says it had sent medicines for 90,000 people to Bannu, but experts here feel this will fall short in the face of a spiraling crisis.

(END)

Displaced children on their way to Bannu, one of the largest cities in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, after they were directed to leave their home in North Waziristan Agency due to a military operation against the Taliban, launched on Jun. 15, 2014. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jun 30 2014 (IPS)

It has been just two weeks since the Pakistan army began a full-blown military offensive – codenamed ‘the sword of the Prophet Muhammad strikes’ (Zarb-e-Asb) – to eradicate the Taliban from the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), particularly from the sprawling North Waziristan Agency.

While many are counting the success of the operation in terms of the number of insurgents killed, few have walked among the real victims of the war: nearly half a million civilians who abandoned their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs, trekked for over 45 km on foot through scorching heat that sometimes touched 45 degrees Celsius, and now find themselves in wretchedly overcrowded camps in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The vast majority of the refugees are women and children, who are reportedly at risk of a plethora of ailments such as diarhhoea, sunstroke or even cardiac arrest, as health officials scramble to meet the needs of this weary population that has settled in the ancient city of Bannu.

Posters and billboards have been posted by Pakistan Tehreek Insaf workers on University Road in Peshawar to urge people to attend their Nov. 23 anti-drone protest. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

Upping the ante against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, celebrated cricketer-turned-political leader Imran Khan has threatened to block NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where his party leads a coalition government.

“We are holding the biggest ever anti-drone protest in Peshawar, where we could decide to block NATO supplies permanently,” Khan, who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), told IPS ahead of massive protests planned by the party for Nov. 23.

“We don’t want to start a fight with the U.S. but we have every right to protest these illegal assaults which kill innocent people,” Khan said, calling the attacks a breach of international law and a violation of human rights.

His party is enraged over a U.S. drone strike at a madrassa or religious seminary that killed at least eight people in Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan, on Nov. 20.

The PTI leads the coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is one of two key routes used by NATO to move supplies in and out of neighbouring Afghanistan and is strategically important as U.S.-led forces prepare to withdraw from the war-torn country in 2014.

“More than 200,000 political activists will gather here to send a very loud and clear message,” Khan said about the Nov. 23 demonstrations. “On the same day, a similar anti-drone protest will take place in the UK.”

When the party had organised a major two-day protest on Apr. 23-24, 2010, NATO supplies were suspended.

The PTI has staunchly opposed drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), adjacent to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The strikes target Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who have taken refuge in FATA along a 2,400-km porous border with Afghanistan after being evicted from Kabul by U.S.-led forces towards the end of 2001.

FATA, which is directly ruled by the federal government, is teeming with militants, some of them with huge bounties on their heads as they are aggressively pursued by the U.S. for alleged involvement in the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Many high-profile Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in the drone strikes.

Khan said his party wants to convey to the world that the U.S. government is killing innocent people in the garb of targeting militants.

“Even if those targeted in these strikes are supposed militants, the U.S. has no right to kill them without taking the Pakistan government into confidence,” Khan said.

Besides, while most drone attacks have taken place in FATA, the Nov. 20 strike was in the PTI’s stronghold of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“We won’t allow drone strikes on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa soil,” Khan said.

He had earlier stated that they would stop NATO supplies even if it meant his party losing its place in the provincial government. But he later stressed that only his party workers would take part in the protest.

“The PTI government in the province will stay away from the protest because we don’t want to take any illegal steps,” Khan said.

The PTI has been accusing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of failing to raise the concerns of Pakistani citizens about drone strikes with President Barack Obama.

“We were the first to point out that these strikes were in total contravention of U.N. and other international law that guarantees the sovereignty of any country,” he said.

He said the U.S. had sabotaged the government’s proposed peace talks with the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan by killing its leader Hakimullah Mehsud in a Nov. 1 drone attack.

“Targeting a madrassa with missiles from a drone, killing our citizens, is a clear violation of the province’s territorial rights,” Muhammad Junaid, a PTI worker, told IPS. The shopkeeper from the militancy-hit Swabi district said drone strikes kill innocent people, including women and children, and should not be permitted by any country.

“We have the right to protest,” said Junaid. “We are ready to join Imran Khan, our leader, in stopping supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan.”

The Jamaat Islami Party and Awami Jamhoori Ittehad, the PTI’s allies in the provincial government, are on the same page.

“Upwards of 150,000 protestors will take part in the protest against drone strikes and over the continuation of NATO supplies,” Jamaat Islami chief Syed Munnawar Hassan said.

“We can stop them [NATO supplies] permanently,” he said.

A match at the recent cricket tournament held in Pakistan's northern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Pakistanis are no strangers to sports-related violence; in fact, many have come to expect scuffles and conflict, especially following a major cricket match. In the country’s northern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), however, cricket has become a tool to promote peace.

For over a decade, FATA and its neighbouring provinces, which form Pakistan’s tribal belt that doubles as the border with Afghanistan, have been a safe haven for Taliban militants fleeing the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Kabul and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan by NATO and its allied forces.

Countless attempts to violently crush the Taliban have failed to completely root the militants out of Pakistan’s rocky, mountainous terrain.

Desperate, the local government has turned its attention to alternative coping strategies, with sports quickly becoming a popular “weapon” in the arsenal against religious extremists, especially as a means of turning tribal youth away from militant activity.

An upbeat Shahid Shinwari, secretary of the FATA Olympic Association, told IPS he was pleasantly surprised by the massive turnout at the recent weeklong cricket tournament in which Mohmand Agency – one of seven districts that comprise the tribal areas – defeated the host Bajaur Agency.

Until 2012, Bajaur Agency was a veritable war zone, witnessing a major government offensive against the Taliban in 2008 that saw the deaths of 1,600 militants and 150 civilians and close to 5,000 injured.

Of the 300,000 civilians forced to flee the fighting, only 18,000 have returned, with most of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in makeshift settlements with little access to the most basic services such as running water and healthcare.

That this troubled district could draw a crowd for purely civilian purposes, with residents “starved for entertainment” coming out in droves to support the 16 teams on Jul. 7-14, signals a major turning point in the search for an “elusive peace” here, according to Shinwari.

He said the celebrations following Mohmand Agency’s narrow eight-run victory stood in stark contrast to the climate of terror and anxiety that has prevailed here for years.

Buoyed by FATA’s innovative approach to fighting off terrorism, a cricket team from the northeastern Afghan border province of Kunar also participated in the tournament sponsored by the Pakistani army.

Kunar’s team captain, who asked not to be named, praised the hospitality extended to his team members, adding that such events were “vital for enhancing relations between the two countries”, whose people endure similar hardships at the hands of the Taliban.

“I only hope that sports continue to promote peace,” he told IPS.

Seventeen-year-old Taj Ali, captain of the home team, told IPS that many young people from his generation joined the Taliban in the absence of outlets for their youthful energy.

Now, he says, FATA has undergone a “sea change”, with youth reveling in this newfound opportunity to “thwart the terrorists”.

About 100 small cricket teams, by far the most popular sport among tribal youth, have popped up in remote villages throughout Bajaur Agency.

Eager to capitalise on local enthusiasm, the Pakistani government last year commissioned a 4.9-million-dollar sports complex, complete with all the necessary facilities for training young athletes such as a gymnasium, cricket and football grounds, and indoor courts for basketball, volleyball, squash and badminton.

Already some 5,000 boys and girls frequent this complex, working with several trained professionals to master the sport of their choice.

Kashif Ali, a 17-year-old kabbadi player (a South Asian wrestling sport popular in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) from the Orakzai Agency, told IPS his brother was a militant for three years, but has now renounced insurgent activity in favour of football.

Kashif says he personally knows at least two-dozen other boys who have done the same, bringing the total of militants-turned-athletes to just over 150.

Trainers say sports also promise poor youth a decent income in the future, with many athletes from FATA joining national teams or professional organisations.

Regional governments are casting their nets wide enough to include women – long marginalised by the Taliban in Pakistan’s northern regions – in the wave of sports fever sweeping the region.

Khanum Bibi, a 16-year-old badminton player, came to Peshawar, capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, in search of facilities that are severely lacking in her hometown. She says women are keen to engage in sports, despite strict religious codes that have excluded them from the playing fields for years.

“Sportswomen perform better academically because outdoor activities keep them fit and healthy,” she told IPS.

Her cousin, who came to Peshawar to be trained as a table tennis player, echoed these sentiments, adding that the KP government ought to make investments in sporting facilities in rural areas so that residents can play with their “own people instead of strangers from Peshawar”.

Over 5,000 women in Pakistan’s northern provinces are part of sports teams.

KP Governor Shaukatullah Khan says the local government has now begun a hunt for 400 acres of land on which to construct a billion-dollar international sports complex – complete with grounds, courts, hostels and medical facilities – for the tribal areas, after recognising that “sports [are] the only way to defeat the Taliban.”

The governor praised FATA’s athletes for having bagged 16 medals at the recent National Games in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, despite their lack of training.

“Our players placed second in archery and third in basketball and judo at the nationwide competition, which surprised everyone,” he said, adding that the honour spoke volumes about FATA residents’ natural aptitude for sports.

Frontier Corps Major General Ghayyur Mahmood, in charge of military operations for FATA, told IPS that sports have also been crucial in efforts to improve law and order in the region, by promoting peace and “a sense of normalcy”.

“We have several major events in the pipeline, for which we are putting in place modern indoor and outdoor facilities [capable of hosting] over 20 games,” Shinwari said.

The most eagerly anticipated of these gatherings is the upcoming 11-day all-agency FATA club tournament, slated to begin on Aug. 14, during which the winning clubs in this past April’s intra-agency competitions will vie for the top slots in basketball, volleyball, cricket, kabbadi, badminton, squash, hockey, kushti (a form of local wrestling), netball, judo and karate.

Kashif Ali and his brother are training hard for the games, hoping to bring glory to their agency and win the respect of their family and community members.

Families and health workers defy the Taliban's ban on oral polio vaccines (OPV). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

Four-year-old Muhammad Jihad is handicapped, and his parents know who to blame: the Taliban.

Jihad’s father, Muhammad Rishad, says the boy tested positive for polio on May 6 at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad.

The family had travelled from their home in North Waziristan, a mountainous region that comprises part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), to ensure their son had the best possible care, only to be told that the virus had spread too far, and little Muhammad would likely never walk again.

"The Taliban are enemies of children. They are against education and vaccination, both of which are necessary for a child’s development.” -- Noor Gul, a schoolteacher in northern Pakistan
A distraught Rishad told IPS, “The Taliban militants are responsible for my son’s (paralysis) – they placed a ban on the oral polio vaccine, so my son could never get immunised.”

Rishad is a daily wage-labourer, who had few dreams beyond securing a decent life for his only son. Now, he says, the Taliban have robbed him of his little hope for the future.

“When he grows up, my son will condemn the militants,” Rishad added, even though such thoughts bring him little solace.

Experts here say children are the future of this troubled country of 170 million, and should be protected at all costs.

Sadly, such advice has fallen on deaf ears in the militancy-ridden northern regions, where the Taliban have imposed a complete ban on all vaccines against preventable childhood diseases, including polio – sometimes referred to simply as “infantile paralysis” due to its crippling effects on a child’s nervous system – measles, diphtheria, hepatitis, meningitis, pertussis, influenza and pneumonia.

Children in all seven agencies of FATA have been the worst affected by the ban on the oral polio vaccination (OPV), which the Taliban have described as a ploy by the United States to render the Muslim population infertile. Over 160,000 children in North Waziristan and 157,000 children in South Waziristan are now at risk of contracting deadly ailments.

The Taliban have used violence and terror to implement the ban – since December 2012 at least 20 volunteer health workers and policemen have been assassinated for daring to defy the militants’ orders by participating in immunisation drives in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh provinces.

Two years ago, polio had been wiped out in all but three countries worldwide: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the recent recurrence of the disease marks several steps back from successful attempts at eradication: from just 28 cases in 2005, the country saw a rapid increase of up to 117 cases in 2008, and 198 cases in 2011.

Eighteen cases have already been reported in 2013, and experts fear that number could rise very quickly.

Dr. Farman Ali, based at the Agency Headquarters Hospital in the town of Miranshah in North Waziristan, told IPS “an outbreak of polio” is never far off when large numbers of children remain unimmunised while the virus is in circulation.

According to the Health Department, medical workers have recorded over 50,000 incidents of families refusing the vaccination in FATA and the KP.

“The Taliban have strictly warned us to stay away from vaccination. They have broken the iceboxes of health workers and threatened to kill them if they (continue their work),” Ali said.

Taliban Spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan told IPS last year that his “leadership decided to ban the vaccine because it was an excuse for the U.S. to send in its spies and expose Taliban leaders to drone strikes…we will allow vaccination when the U.S. stops its drone strikes.”

But rather than the U.S. government, it is poor families who are paying the price for this ban.

Gul Daraz, a resident of North Waziristan Agency, has a three-year-old son who had already received his first dose of the OPV when the ban was announced. Because he was never allowed to complete the full course of three doses, as required by the World Health Organisation, he is now handicapped.

“Every time my wife sees our crippled son, it reduces her to tears,” Daraz, a poor shopkeeper, told IPS.

Sadly they are not alone in their plight. According to FATA Health Director Dr. Fawad Khan, “We have only been able to vaccinate 400,000 of the 900,000 target children under five years in FATA.”

He told IPS 58 cases were reported across the country last year, including 27 in KP and 20 in FATA, of which 12 of the victims had been prevented from receiving the OPV.

Zareen Taja, a housewife in FATA’s Bajaur Agency, told IPS over the phone, “My son is very beautiful, but he will not be able to walk like normal people. I have no one to blame but the Taliban.”

At this rate, she added, Pakistan will never achieve its goal of eradicating this preventable disease that has been stamped out in all but two other countries in the world.

Noor Gul, a schoolteacher in the Frontier Region Bannu, whose son is one of the two affected children in the province, labeled the Taliban “enemies of children”.

“They are against education and vaccination, both of which are necessary for a child’s development.”

An international conference of Islamic scholars held on Jun. 6 in the capital, Islamabad, condemned Taliban militants for killing Pakistani polio workers, and held them responsible for the resurgence of the disease.

Dr. Muhammad Wesam, chief scholar of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, told conference participants that the Taliban’s campaign “contravenes Islam”.

Thirty-four scholars from Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia issued a decree saying that those impeding vaccination efforts were committing a crime, for which God would hold them accountable.

Such interventions by clerics are crucial to correcting the misconception that OPV is “anti-Islamic”. Dr. Jan Baz Afridi, head of the KP immunisation programme, told IPS his office is working with religious scholars and volunteer health workers to continue vaccination drives.

“We are under tremendous pressure to immunise all 5.2 million children in the KP in order to effectively wipe out the disease,” he added.

Since 2008, militants in Pakistan have torched over 5,000 vehicles carrying NATO supplies to Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States is laying meticulous plans ahead of its 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has clearly overlooked how its continued drones strikes on the tribal areas of neighbouring Pakistan will affect the much-anticipated pullout.

Last week, a group of militants belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) torched three containers stuffed with supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, as they trundled along the stony mountain pass known as Torkham Road in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

The militants claimed the attack on the convoy of 12 containers was payback for the drone strike on May 29 that killed TTP Deputy Leader Waliur Rehman in North Waziristan province, one of seven zones comprising the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The incident last month brought the total number of drone strikes on the region to over 355 since 2005. But while the U.S. government has hitherto been happy to turn a blind eye to various forms of protest against its campaign of remote warfare – from civilian marches, to government statements – the burning of NATO-bound vehicles might signal a turning point in its controversial foreign policy.

Muhammad Mushtaq, an office-bearer of the NATO Suppliers Association – a local collective of drivers, cleaners and vehicle owners involved in the transport of supplies across the border – told IPS, “Since 2008, more than 5,000 NATO vehicles have been burnt down in Peshawar and the Khyber Agency, all of them en route to Afghanistan to replenish the forces engaged in a war against terrorism since 2002.”

In the process, he said, not only have roughly 10 million dollars worth of equipment and supplies been reduced to ashes, but more than 500 people, including drivers and cleaners, have lost their lives.

In December 2008, 160 NATO vehicles carrying Humvees destined for Afghanistan were burnt in a single attack near Peshawar, capital of the KP, Mushtaq said. The militants later paraded triumphantly amid billowing flames that blackened the sky.

Most of the vehicles heading to Afghanistan carry military equipment, food, and other logistical supplies for the roughly 100,000 foreign troops stationed there, Retired Major Anwar Khan, a security analyst, told IPS.

“This same route will also likely be used for the withdrawal of heavy military hardware as well as soldiers,” he said. Thus, if drone strikes continue, the U.S. risks leaving its main access and exit route vulnerable to attacks.

Khan says that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ must revisit their military strategy if they are determined to stick to the 2014 date. “Otherwise, the chances of their withdrawal and peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan will remain a dream.”

An eye for an eye 

When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001, it signaled the beginning of a war that would drag on for over a decade.

Members of the deposed regime, along with their supporters, fled en masse into the mountains that form the rugged 1,200-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, prompting the latter to throw in its lot with the U.S. in the hopes of preventing the militants from taking root in its own, volatile tribal zones.

But promises to destroy the Al Qaeda network charged with carrying out the bombing of the U.S.’s twin towers on Sep. 11, 2001, have failed to bear fruit, with many commentators observing that the militants are stronger than ever.

Last May, against the backdrop of rising costs, a mounting death toll and loud public opposition to the war, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, agreeing to withdraw forces by 2014 and hand over power to the locally elected government.

But experts like Pervez Jamal, professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, believe this plan will fall flat unless immediate measures are taken to appease the TTP.

As Khan pointed out, “The burning of vehicles has already made the war against terrorism more expensive for the U.S. and its allies.”

Currently, 70 percent of supplies for Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan come through Pakistan, where they arrive by ship at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi before travelling 3,000 kilometres to the Bagram Airfield in Kabul.

In November 2011, the Pakistan government ordered the closure of this supply route when U.S. forces attacked a Pakistani security post in FATA’s Mohmand Agency, killing 24 soldiers.

Deprived of a land route, the U.S. was forced to explore alternative, aerial routes through Russia and the former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan. During this time, the cost of transporting supplies went from 17 million dollars to 104 million dollars.

Unable to sustain these costs, the U.S. government issued an apology for the attack, and the supply route was re-opened in 2012, with the understanding that it would remain functional until 2015, to facilitate a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But this agreement is now in jeopardy.

The burning of supplies also spells danger for the 10,000 troops tasked with remaining on the ground to assist the 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces with the political transition.

The local security force currently lacks training and military equipment; without the promise of reinforcements, some experts say they will be no match for an attempted power grab by the militants.

Javed Hasham, an Afghan war analyst based in Peshawar, told IPS that the Taliban are capable of destroying convoys very easily. Torkham Road is an exposed mountain pass, with no security outposts along the way. The Taliban, familiar with the terrain, have hideouts in hills and houses that overlook the winding road.

Attacks on supply convoys had recorded a massive decrease over the past four months but have recently picked up again, keeping pace with increased drone strikes.

Hasham believes it unlikely that even the Pakistan government, which is loathe to support the Taliban, will not chastise the militants for these attacks, as it, too, sees the drone strikes as a severe encroachment on national sovereignty.

“The only way forward is for the U.S. to put its drone strikes on hold,” Hasham said.

The Agency Headquarters Hospital (AHH) in Bajaur Agency, shortly after a Taliban suicide bomb attack. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, May 1 2013 (IPS)

Akbar Shah was sitting with his sick wife in the gynaecology ward of the Agency Headquarters Hospital in Bajaur Agency, a division of northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), when a bomb ripped through the facility, scattering patients, doctors and medical supplies.

“We immediately rushed my wife to Peshawar (capital of the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) because the doctors, paramedics and nurses were panicked and unable to look after patients,” Shah told IPS.

Hours later, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the Apr. 20 suicide mission.

"The Taliban are just inviting the wrath of God Almighty by targeting healthcare facilities...The patients should be shown mercy."
Shah’s wife is now being treated in a hospital in Peshawar and though her condition is showing signs of improvement, Shah still curses the Taliban for its ruthless campaign against health facilities in the region.

The entire medical community, along with a large majority of the general public, has slammed this latest attack, which killed four people, as a plot to deprive FATA’s population of six million people of adequate healthcare.

According to Dr. Shaukat Ali at the FATA Health Directorate, the 200-bed Agency Headquarters Hospital (AHH) had provided treatment to over 100,000 patients annually, with the help of 120 doctors and 100 paramedics.

“It is the only specialised hospital in FATA,” he told IPS, but it is now devoid of both patients and doctors, who have fled to Peshawar.

With 26 hospitals, 10 rural health centres and 419 community health centres, FATA is well equipped to deal with all of its residents’ medical needs. But if the attacks do not stop immediately, Shaukat Ali warned, the entire health system here will be rendered ineffective.

Meanwhile, medical facilities in Peshawar are struggling to keep pace with the influx of patients from tribal areas on the Afghanistan border, who say they are “too afraid” to visit hospitals that might be targeted by militants.

Dr Ahmad Sher at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar told IPS his facility received about 20,000 patients from FATA in 2012 alone.

“The Taliban are just inviting the wrath of God Almighty by targeting healthcare facilities where patients are treated for different ailments. The patients should be shown mercy,” he said.

So far the Taliban have destroyed about 400 health facilities in FATA and the Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province.

“Since 2008, the Taliban militants have damaged 128 health facilities in FATA,” Secretary of the Provincial Doctors Association (PDA) Dr. Muhammad Irfan told IPS, while the adjacent KP lost 55 health facilities between 2007 and 2009, during the Taliban’s illegal rule over the Swat district.

Militants have been particularly unforgiving of those who defy the so-called “ban” on polio immunisation, which they have labeled “un-Islamic”. The group also claims the oral polio vaccine (OPV) was designed to render the recipients impotent and infertile in order to “curb” population growth of Muslims.

In the past three months the Taliban have claimed responsibility for the deaths of 17 policemen, female vaccinators and volunteers in polio-related violence.

Last year, out of a total of 58 cases of polio in the country, 27 were recorded in the KP and 20 in FATA, which experts believe is likely the result of the Taliban’s interference with immunisation drives.

Fathema Murtaza, Pakistan spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF) told IPS it is crucial that medical structures and patients be spared from violence.

“MSF…calls for respect for the safety and security of patients, health facilities, and medical staff,” the group said in a press release last week. “All actors in the area must ensure that medical activities can take place unhindered and not be targeted.”

Since March, MSF medical teams have been running mobile clinics in Bajaur, providing services in three Basic Healthcare Units (BHUs) where about 200 patients are treated every week, Murtaza said.

“The safety and security of healthcare is essential for MSF to continue to expand its medical intervention in Bajaur,” she added.

The PDA’s Dr. Muhammad Irfan condemned the Taliban and asked the government to tighten security on hospitals so patients can receive necessary treatment undisturbed.

“We will hire private security guards and will impart training to our watchmen and other staff on how to foil terror (plots),” FATA’s director of health, Dr. Fawad Khan, informed IPS.

In that same vein, the female staff of government-run hospitals will be trained on how to conduct body searches of female visitors and take appropriate measures if they encounter anything suspicious.

The health directorate has also sought the services of the KP police in the training of health personnel.

Like other experts and medical professionals here, Khan believes the targeting of health facilities is particularly egregious in a region that is already lagging behind global health indicators, particularly with regards to maternal mortality.

“About 365 women (per 100,000 live births) die every year in Pakistan’s four provinces, while in FATA the number is closer to 400 due to pregnancy-related complications,” he said.

Similarly, FATA only has a 40 percent immunisation rate, compared to a nationwide rate of 67 percent.

A majority of FATA’s 400 qualified doctors are too afraid to go to work because of the dangers that loom over them every day, he added.

(END)

Officials of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Wildlife Department holding falcons seized from illegal hunters in Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

While the Taliban’s military activities continue to plague Pakistan’s northern Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the incessant violence has been a blessing in disguise for one creature: the falcon.

Declared endangered by the Union for the Conservation of Nature, this bird of prey suffered for years at the hands of poachers and hunters, whose unfettered access to FATA and the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province guaranteed the birds a short life span in the wild, with most destined to be trapped, killed or sold.

But “continued militancy has kept the poachers (and hunters) away,” Khalid Shah, an official at the KP Wildlife Department, told IPS, adding that the survival rate of falcons and some other migratory birds has “increased tremendously”.

In 2005 only 2,000 falcons lived in these northern territories, but by 2008 wildlife officials had recorded an increase of up to 8,000 birds.

Experts trace this population growth to the beginning of the insurgency here, which began after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the government in Kabul and sent scores of Taliban and Al Qaeda members across the border into Pakistan’s sprawling mountainous terrain.

Being the U.S. ’s ally in the so-called “war on terror”, the Pakistan army has engaged in a military offensive to root out the insurgents, believed to be scattered across all seven districts that comprise FATA.

Under fire from both sides, civilian residents say militancy has made daily activities – among them hunting and poaching — impossible.

Hunting, trapping, poaching

Falcons begin arriving in Pakistan from Siberia, China, Russia and Afghanistan during the months of August and September and either take up residence in desert landscapes, or nest in the foothills of arid regions.

In FATA the birds find a ready supply of food in the form of “reptiles, mammals, insects and small birds”, while thickly-forested parts of the tribal areas offer a safe and natural habitat, wild conservationist Ali Murad told IPS.

Besides playing host to migratory guests, the region is also home to several indigenous falcon species. In total, Pakistan boasts 10 falcon species at the height of the migration season.

The number of falcons in northern Pakistan has increased from 2,000 to 8,000 since the onset of militancy. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Falcons are monogamous creatures with a slow reproduction rate, placing them in popular demand as rare trophies, Murad added. The female lays just two eggs annually; usually, only one chick survives and takes five years to reach adulthood.

Arab nationals use the birds – particularly the females — for falconry, especially for hunting houbara bustard in Pakistan and other countries.

“Dignitaries from Arab countries visit the KP and FATA to purchase the falcon of their choice from a market fed by hundreds of trappers,” Fareed Khan, a falcon dealer, told IPS.

Falcon trappers attach balls of nylon and feathers to the feet of smaller birds like kestrels, Laggar Falcons and white-eyed buzzard. Mistaking these contraptions for prey, larger falcons sink their talons into the “bait”, causing both birds to tumble to the ground and into the hands of the waiting trappers, Khan elaborated.

Sometimes, small birds like doves, pigeons and quails are placed as bait underneath nets on the ground. When the falcons swoop down on their prey they become entangled in the nets and are easily captured.

The large-scale trapping, hunting and dealing of falcons was in full swing when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) declared the bird an endangered species in 2005, prompting the government to place a complete ban on issuance of licences to those who would interrupt the bird’s natural life.

Those licences had brought the government about 12,000 dollars annually.

Prior to the advent of terrorism, “hunters continued illegal poaching in KP and earned thousands of dollars from the sale of falcons to well-heeled Arabs”, Murad said.

“Now,” according to KP official Khalid Shah, “military activity, gunfire, the use of tanks and other kinds of warfare” have made FATA and the KP virtually too dangerous to enter.

For wildlife enthusiasts and environmentalists who have long fought against the relentless killing and capture of the birds, this is a bittersweet victory, as it comes at the expense of peace in Pakistan ’s tribal areas.

Birds still at risk

Wildlife officials, in “collaboration with the KP Forest Department, are working on habitat improvement for falcons to further encourage” population growth, Shah said.

The government is also working to implement its ban by imposing harsh penalties on those who violate the law.

“The government has issued over 450 challans (orders for payment of fines) in the last five years, bringing in revenue worth roughly 3,000 dollars,” Wildlife Department Spokesperson Kashifullah Shah told IPS.

In March alone, seven falcons have been confiscated and released. An additional 20 falcons were confiscated in January and February of 2013 and released into the wild, he said.

Kashifullah Shah says a shortage of staff and a dearth of adequate facilities have hampered efforts to bring about the desired results.

The population could be raised much more if stronger measures are taken, he stressed.

With a going rate of between one and ten million rupees (10,000 and 100,000 dollars), falcons are prized trophies, and neither militancy nor a government ban will be sufficient to keep hunters and trappers at bay forever.

“Only 450 field workers are not enough to stop illegal hunting and smuggling of falcons in the province, (especially) since each of the workers is required to monitor an area of 200 square kilometres on foot, while the trappers have (modern equipment) and vehicles.”

“We need to deploy more staff with vehicles in potential hunting areas where hundreds of trappers are active, like Swat, Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan to conserve the species,” he said.

“We should also involve local communities by establishing village conservation committees to keep an eye on the hunters. This strategy has worked well in the past.”

This programme also helps scale up public awareness about the endangered creature and the importance of preserving its natural habitat.

(END)

Children stand around the ruins of an old school building in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 10 2013 (IPS)

Eight-year-old Muhammad Akram was forced to quit school when he was in the second grade, when the Taliban destroyed the small, government-run school that he and his brother had been attending.

“Father couldn’t afford the expenses of private school,” Akram, a resident of Mohmand Agency, one of seven agencies that comprise northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), told IPS.

Families in the militancy-stricken FATA, a hotbed of violence, blame the Pakistan military and the Taliban in equal measure for reducing the education system here to rubble.

The Taliban’s intolerance for any kind of “modern” education, which they believe to be “anti-Islamic”, coupled with the destruction or occupation of scores of school buildings for military purposes, has robbed tens of thousands of children of their right to gain a decent schooling, resulting in a literacy rate of 16 percent – the lowest in all of Pakistan.

Despite wishing to stay in school and pursue their studies, children spend their days playing in the streets and roaming about aimlessly, Akram lamented.

FATA Assistant Education Officer Mohammad Rehman told IPS, “Taliban militants, who are strictly opposed to modern education, have destroyed more schools in Mohmand than any other agency. Their campaign has left 12,000 children, including over 3,800 girls, idle.”

He added that damages to over 460 schools throughout FATA’s seven agencies – including 110 in Mohmand, 103 in Bajaur, 70 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 55 in Kurram, 65 in Orakzai, 44 in North Waziristan and 16 in South Waziristan – have “displaced” 62,000 children, including 23,000 girls, from school.

The education crisis here is the result of over a decade of militancy, which began when U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul, forcing militants to flee Afghanistan.

The ‘war on terror’ that followed the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 pushed hard-line militants to take up refuge along the 2,400-kilometre-long porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and eventually settle in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

From here the militants began their campaign of terror, which included attacking government institutions and offices, as well as slowly but surely pulverising the school system across the region.

“The very first school to be destroyed was in South Waziristan. The campaign is still continuing today,” Rehman said.

But the militants are not the only ones to blame. Roughly, 100,000 military troops who are carrying out operations in the FATA in an effort to “eradicate” the Taliban use state-run buildings as hideouts.

“The army also live in government schools and the children have to stay home instead of studying,” according to a resident of Orakzai.

The army’s presence has brought despair in its wake, with some residents claiming that the army and the Taliban “are two sides of the same coin” in terms of their attitude to education and the younger generation.

There is no official record of the number of schools under military control in FATA because authorities fear “reprisals” for revealing such data, the Orakzai resident, who did not wish to be named, told IPS.

But what is plain to see is that the army has been utilising schools as “offices” and “camps” since 2005, he said.

For example, Cadet College Razmak in North Waziristan is closed to students because it serves as an army camp. The army has declared certain areas “war zones”, effectively making schools within those parameters off-limits to students.

However, the FATA secretariat was able to disclose that the army has reconstructed 80 schools in areas deemed “peaceful”, according to the source.

Education expert Umar Farooq told IPS that such a devastating scenario is likely to “send FATA youth back to the Stone Age.

“The literacy has dropped from 30 percent in 2000 to about 16 percent in 2011,” he added.

FATA, which already had the lowest literacy rate in the country, compared to a nationwide average of 47 percent, is now faced with the gargantuan task of rebuilding Taliban-damaged schools, reclaiming those occupied by the army and preventing even further destruction, according to Farooq.

Umar Daraz Khan, an official at the directorate of education in FATA, told IPS that an acute shortage of funds to repair and reconstruct schools has stalled efforts to pull the literacy rate back to a reasonable level.

And even in the rare moments when funding becomes available, the Taliban’s ongoing anti-education campaign makes reconstruction that much more difficult to accomplish, Khan added.

So far, 72 million dollars from the government of Saudi Arabia has enabled the reconstruction of 60 schools in Bajaur Agency, he said. But experts and residents alike are agreed that a lot more remains to be done.

Meanwhile, teachers are also feeling the impact of a dying school system.

Ghani Shah, a teacher who was rendered jobless last March after the Taliban destroyed the school he worked at in Bajaur Agency, is furious at both the Taliban and the army. He is one of 15 teachers at the school who is now forced to do “odd jobs like selling fruits and other part-time jobs, because there is no hope of immediate reconstruction of the damaged schools,” he told IPS.

Akhunzada Mohammad Chittan, a lawmaker from Bajaur Agency, told IPS over the telephone that the government was extremely upset about the militancy in FATA and was trying its level best to defeat the Taliban as soon as possible and rebuild the schools.

“We have established tent schools in many agencies but these can’t substitute cemented buildings,” he said, adding that the militants are “enemies of Islam as well as the children”.

But some have given up hope that things will change.

Muhammad Jaffar, a farmer from Orakzai Agency, says he migrated to the nearby Kohat district in KP in order to raise his two sons and daughter in a peaceful environment.

“There is no hope that the schools will re-open any time soon because the army operation has been in progress since 2005 in FATA but the militants are still (active). Therefore, my decision to leave my hometown for the sake of educating my children was the correct one,” he told IPS.

He believes that the children of FATA will grow up to be “monsters” if immediate measures are not taken to safeguard their right to a decent education.

(END)

A rise in militancy in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has forced residents to flee in search of employment. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHWAR, Pakistan, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

Fifty-nine-year-old Sherdil Shah, a resident of South Waziristan – a hotbed of militancy in northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – used to run a modest grain shop that fetched enough money to keep his family of 10 well-fed and looked after.

That is, until a 2006 army operation against the Taliban destroyed his business and devastated the arable land on which he cultivated his grain.

After that, “We couldn’t use our agricultural land,” Shah told IPS. He was forced to sell his property for a paltry sum of money and, in a final act of desperation, sent his sons abroad to work – a decision that ended up completely changing his life.

His sons, both working in Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), now send home about 1,500 dollars every month, enough for the entire family to live on comfortably.

Five years since the boys left for the Gulf, “I have bought a house in the adjacent Dera Ismail Khan district and started my business again here,” Shah told IPS over the phone.

Militancy means migration

Shah’s story is not an unusual one. A majority of the 5.5 million people living in FATA have been similarly affected by the decade-old militancy, which began in earnest in 2001 when U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul, forcing the militants to cross over to Pakistan and establish sanctuaries along the 2,400-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

FATA soon became infested with Taliban cells. As Pakistan emerged as a frontline state in the U.S.’ ‘war on terror’, armed forces poured into FATA in a full-scale military offensive in 2005 designed to root out the Taliban.

The army offensive, coupled with the militants’ resistance, made it impossible for civilians to carry on with everyday life.

Now, for the first time in years, people like Shah are finally starting to see improvements in their lives, as remittances from a younger generation of migrants who fled the region in search of employment abroad streams into FATA, easing the financial burden of unrelenting militancy.

Usman Wali once hailed from the Orakzai Agency, one of FATA’s seven tribal districts, which has been battered by endless violence. Life there was hard, with most families confined to their homes by the threat of the Taliban’s activities or army-imposed curfews.

Under the shadow of conflict, “We lost everything we had,” Wali told IPS. Even acquiring the basic necessities of life was a daily struggle, due to a lack of money and mobility.

“One day we decided to leave our ancestral village and take refuge in a government-run camp in the Hangu district of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

But life in the camp was like hell on earth, and soon the family of 13 knew they had no choice but to leave. “Then a local contractor took my two sons and a brother to Saudi Arabia, which changed our lives,” he said.

With the help of remittances from his family, Wali recently migrated to the nearby Hangu district and established a booming cloth business there.

“Now, we own a beautiful house and a cement business,” he added.

A daily wage labourer named Ghaffar Khan, from the violence-wracked Mohmand Agency says the radicalisation of FATA and an escalation in militancy ironically brought him benefits.

“In 2005, I earned about five dollars per day but now my daily income is more than 120 dollars,” Khan, who is currently on leave from his job in the emirate of Sharjah, the third largest in the UAE, told IPS.

His house in Mohmand Agency is still intact but his seven-member family has moved to the nearby Charssada district of the KP province due to the deterioration of law and order in their native village.

Khan returns home for a month every year to spend time with his family.

Abu Zar, an official at the FATA Secretariat, told IPS that the militarisation of the region has brought misery to many residents but has also fuelled a wave of migration to Gulf states like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, which is now helping people get back on their feet.

“Currently, more than 400,000 FATA residents are living and working in foreign countries”, up from less than 100,000 prior to 2005, he said.

“The younger generation has been going abroad in droves because of the prolonged insurgency”, in order to escape a sharp decline in trade, business opportunities and income in FATA, he added.

Akhunzada Mohammad Chittan, a lawmaker from Bajaur Agency, says immigrants from FATA have a reputation for being “extremely hard working. Once they land abroad they can earn a lot because they are honest and dedicated,” he said.

About 95 percent of the tribal residents currently working abroad are uneducated, and initially lacked skills, but have performed very well in their new jobs, Chittan added.

“I know at least 500 people who learnt skills such as driving, tailoring and carpentry before going abroad, showing their dedication (to starting life afresh),” he told IPS.

Adnan Ali, manager of a Peshawar-based overseas recruitment agency, says that the demand for FATA migrant workers in the Gulf is growing exponentially.

“Last month we sent 100 young men from different FATA areas to the UAE, Qatar and Dubai. All of them are very happy,” he told IPS.

According to Najamuddin Khan, an overseas employment manager, “We place advertisements in newspapers about various vacancies in foreign countries.

A majority of the respondents are youth from FATA who are desperately looking for work, he told IPS in Peshawar.