warheads and they were worried about who was going to control them. They talked about stopping their billions of dollars in aid and sending troops instead.
At the start of May our army launched Operation True Path to drive the Taliban out of Swat. We heard they were dropping hundreds of commandos from helicopters into the mountains in the north. More troops appeared in Mingora too. This time they would clear the town. They announced over megaphones that all residents should leave.
My father said we should stay. But the gunfire kept us awake most nights. Everyone was in a continuous state of anxiety. One night we were woken up by screaming. We had recently got some pets – three white chickens and a white rabbit that one of Khushal’s friends had given him and which we let wander around the house. Atal was only five then and really loved that rabbit so it used to sleep under my parents’ bed. But it used to wee everywhere so that night we put it outside. Around midnight a cat came and killed it. We all heard the rabbit’s agonised cries. Atal would not stop weeping. ‘Let the sun come and I will teach that cat a lesson tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I will kill him.’ It seemed like a bad omen.
15
Leaving the Valley
LEAVING THE VALLEY was harder than anything I had done before. I remembered the
Leaving our home felt like having my heart ripped out. I stood on our roof looking at the mountains, the snow-topped Mount Elum where Alexander the Great had reached up and touched Jupiter. I looked at the trees all coming into leaf. The fruit of our apricot tree might be eaten by someone else this year. Everything was silent, pin-drop silent. There was no sound from the river or the wind; even the birds were not chirping.
I wanted to cry because I felt in my heart I might never see my home again. The documentary makers had asked me how I would feel if one day I left Swat and never came back. At the time I had thought it was a stupid question, but now I saw that everything I could not imagine happening had happened. I thought my school would not close and it had. I thought we would never leave Swat and we were just about to. I thought Swat would be free of the Taliban one day and we would rejoice, but now I realised that might not happen. I started to cry. It was as if everyone had been waiting for someone else to start. My cousin’s wife, Honey, started weeping, then all of us were crying. But my mother was very composed and courageous.
I put all my books and notebooks in my school bag then packed another bag of clothes. I couldn’t think straight. I took the trousers from one set and the top from another so I had a bag of things which didn’t match. I didn’t take any of my school awards or photos or personal belongings as we were travelling in someone else’s car and there was little room. We didn’t own anything expensive like a laptop or jewellery – our only valuable items had been our TV, a fridge and a washing machine. We didn’t lead a life of luxury – we Pashtuns prefer to sit on floors rather than chairs. Our house has holes in the walls, and every plate and cup is cracked.
My father had resisted leaving till the end. But then some of my parents’ friends had lost a relative in gunfire so they went to the house to offer prayers of condolences even though nobody was really venturing out. Seeing their grief made my mother determined to leave. She told my father, ‘You don’t have to come, but I am going and I will take the children to Shangla.’ She knew he couldn’t let her go alone. My mother had had enough of the gunfire and tension and called Dr Afzal and begged him to persuade my father to leave. He and his family were going so they offered us a lift. We didn’t have a car so we were lucky that our neighbours, Safina and her family, were also leaving and could fit some of us in their car while the rest would go with Dr Afzal.
On 5 May 2009 we became IDPs. Internally displaced persons. It sounded like a disease.
There were a lot of us – not just us five but also my grandmother, my cousin, his wife, Honey, and their baby. My brothers also wanted to take their pet chickens – mine had died because I washed it in cold water on a winter’s day. It wouldn’t revive even when I put it in a shoebox in the house to keep it warm and got everyone in the neighbourhood to pray for it. My mother refused to let the chickens come. What if they make a mess in the car? she asked. Atal suggested we buy them nappies! In the end we left them with a lot of water and corn. She also said I must leave my school bag because there was so little room. I was horrified. I went and whispered Quranic verses over the books to try and protect them.
Finally everyone was ready. My mother, father, grandmother, my cousin’s wife and baby and my brothers all squashed into the back of Dr Afzal’s van along with his wife and children. There were children in the laps of adults and smaller children in their laps. I was luckier – there were fewer people in Safina’s car – but I was devastated by the loss of my school bag. Because I had packed my books separately, I had had to leave them all behind.
We all said
The streets were jam-packed. I had never seen them so busy before. There were cars everywhere, as well as rickshaws, mule carts and trucks laden with people and their belongings. There were even motorbikes with entire families balanced on them. Thousands of people were leaving with just the clothes they had on their backs. It felt as if the whole valley was on the move. Some people believe that the Pashtuns descend from one of the lost tribes of Israel, and my father said, ‘It is as though we are the Israelites leaving Egypt, but we have no Moses to guide us.’ Few people knew where they were going, they just knew they had to leave. This was the biggest exodus in Pashtun history.
Usually there are many ways out of Mingora, but the Taliban had cut down several huge apple trees and used them to block some routes so everyone was squashed onto the same road. We were an ocean of people. The Taliban patrolled the roads with guns and watched us from the tops of buildings. They were keeping the cars in lines but with weapons not whistles. ‘Traffic Taliban,’ we joked to try and keep our spirits up. At regular intervals along the road we passed army and Taliban checkpoints side by side. Once again the army was seemingly unaware of the Taliban’s presence.
‘Maybe they have poor eyesight,’ we laughed, ‘and can’t see them.’
The road was heaving with traffic. It was a long slow journey and we were all very sweaty crammed in together. Usually car journeys are an adventure for us children as we rarely go anywhere. But this was different. Everyone was depressed.
Inside Dr Afzal’s van my father was talking to the media, giving a running commentary on the exodus from the valley. My mother kept telling him to keep his voice down for fear the Taliban would hear him. My father’s voice is so loud my mother often jokes that he doesn’t need to make phone calls, he can just shout.
Finally we got through the mountain pass at Malakand and left Swat behind. It was late afternoon by the time we reached Mardan, which is a hot and busy city.
My father kept insisting to everyone ‘in a few days we will return. Everything will be fine.’ But we knew that was not true.
In Mardan there were already big camps of white UNHCR tents like those for Afghan refugees in Peshawar. We weren’t going to stay in the camps because it was the worst idea ever. Almost two million of us were fleeing Swat and you couldn’t have fitted two million people in those camps. Even if there was a tent for us, it was far too hot inside and there was talk that diseases like cholera were spreading. My father said he had heard rumours that some Taliban were even hiding inside the camps and harassing the women.
Those who could, stayed in the homes of local people or with family and friends. Amazingly three-quarters of all the IDPs were put up by the people of Mardan and the nearby town of Swabi. They opened the doors of their homes, schools and mosques to the refugees. In our culture women are expected not to mix with men they are not related to. In order to protect women’s purdah, men in families hosting the refugees even slept away from
