Here is a very insightful look at what life is really like under Taliban rule.
Brave defiance in Pakistan’s Swat Valley
MINGORA, PAKISTAN–It’s hard to picture the Green Chowk traffic circle as a landmark steeped in horror.Cars, pickup trucks and donkey-pulled carts lurch through the roundabout, passing billboards advertising guest houses, Internet cafés and Pepsi-Cola. But mere months ago, there was nothing routine about this potholed intersection. For more than two years, Mingora was a base for Islamic militants who called themselves Taliban. They routinely rounded up enemies – residents say 40 were targeted in one
three-month period – dragged them to this traffic circle near crowded bazaars and butcher shops, and cut off their heads.For good measure, they placed their victim’s head on his chest and pinned a note warning the removal of the deceased before noon the next day would herald more beheadings. (Women weren’t decapitated, merely shot.) “There’s been no rule of law, only a jungle law,” says Zia Yousafzai, a school principal. “You can’t imagine what it has been like, especially for our children.” Mingora residents like Yousafzai, his 12-year-old daughter, Malala, and others, have lived through the nightmare and are now providing a first-hand glimpse of life under the Taliban. Theirs are stories of panic, paranoia and unlikely courage. A city of about 350,000, Mingora is tucked among orchards and mountain vistas in Pakistan’s serene Swat Valley. To travel here from Islamabad, you drive on a narrow road that snakes along the sides of majestic mountains. At one time, this was a place the country’s elite came to ski, hike trails and splash in glacier-fed rivers. The Taliban came for other reasons. The Swat Valley is an ideal strategic location as a base of operations just four hours from Islamabad. This summer, after Pakistan’s government ceded control of Swat to the Taliban in a peace deal, militants began seizing control of towns even closer to the capital. Pakistan’s hand was forced, and the military subsequently pushed the Taliban out of Mingora. In the fighting, thousands fled Swat to live in refugee camps near Islamabad. Now, most of those people have returned to Swat as Pakistan’s army battles the Taliban in the remote South Waziristan region. But the terror of life under the Taliban still haunts them. Read the full article.
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