The dirtiest war

It was a cold, wet February morning when Zaidi Bibi received the headless body of her husband. The details are seared into her brain—how could she forget? “His hands were tied behind his back,” she recalls, telling her story from behind a thick curtain in compliance with her culture’s strict code of separation between men and women. “His head was also tied back there, like he was holding it in his own hands.” Bibi pauses in her narrative; her laboured breath sounds through the dense fibres of the curtain. She’s never had to recount this story before—no one has ever asked her about it. Recollecting her composure, she continues. “There used to be so much happiness in this house,” she says. “Now there is only hatred. To me, it only feels like my husband died yesterday. I still think about him constantly. I still have nightmares about his headless body. There is no happiness left here anymore.”

Hers is a familiar story in Swat, repeated hundreds of times over by widows throughout the lush valley just over 100 km northwest of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Ahmed Khan, her husband, didn’t arrive home from his nightly rounds as a rickshaw driver one morning, and remained missing for six days. On the seventh, his brother received a call from the Taliban telling him to come and pick up the “spy’s” body, along with Ahmed’s rickshaw. “My husband was no spy,” Bibi says. “He was a hard-working man who loved his children. And they killed him. They murdered him.”

Aziz Urrahman, Bibi’s brother-in-law, and now also the family breadwinner and protector, listens to her story with an ever-darkening look of malice. For the 23-year-old Pashtun, his code of honour demands revenge for his brother’s death. From the courtyard of his dead brother’s home, on the eastern outskirts of Mingora, Swat’s main city, he looks over at the verdant mountains of the Swat valley. Somewhere in their valleys, he says, are the men who killed his brother. But it’s been eight months since the Taliban returned the body, and he feels impotent.

Urrahman’s unrequited vengeance falls into a rapidly diminishing category. In the two years since Swat fell under the influence of Taliban militants, thousands of civilians have been killed, many in the same gruesome way as his brother. But now that the Pakistani military’s four-month offensive has succeeded in splintering the organization that once terrorized the area, it is payback time. Revenge is a word you’ll hear often these days in Swat, from the ravaged streets of Mingora through the fruit orchards of outlying villages. Once peaceful citizens like Urrahman have turned vigilante, hunting down and killing suspected Taliban militants in a frenzy of brutal murders that has shocked Pakistani human rights groups. Rumours that the military is also involved have been swept aside by authorities desperate to portray the Swat victory as a turning point in Pakistan’s battle against Islamic militancy.

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