Taliban Sultans of Swat's reign of terror

Sunday Times:

IN a darkened room in Peshawar, far from prying eyes, a medical student from the Swat valley opens his laptop and begins a slideshow of terror. Over the past three years, the 22-year-old has secretly catalogued the horrors of life in Swat under the Taliban.

The burning-down of schools, bodies hanging upside down, public lashings and decapitated heads with dollars stuffed in their nostrils and notes reading, “This is what happens to spies,” were all captured on his mobile phone at great personal risk.

“I’m training to be a doctor; our mission is to prolong life and in front of me are these people who care nothing for human life,” he explained as, with each click of the mouse, he revealed more bodies in pools of blood. All the images were too gruesome to publish.

It was the first detailed account from inside Mingora, the capital of Swat, which was the focus of fierce fighting last night as Pakistani troops tried to drive out Taliban forces.

They entered the city in the fourth week of the army’s biggest offensive yet inside Pakistan, an operation that has sent 1.7m refugees flooding down to the plains.

The student has been e-mailing The Sunday Times for more than a year, his messages becoming ever more despairing until eventually he left Swat two weeks ago when the electricity and water were cut off. “The health situation is very bad. There are only three doctors in the main district hospital,” he wrote. “I am also in severely depressed state. Keep praying.”

Using his grisly photographic archive, he described how the Taliban leaders Sufi Muhammad and his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah won public support with the complicity of the authorities before spreading their reign of terror.

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In December, Fazlullah announced a deadline of January 15 for all girls to stop attending school. Yusufzai hoped that they would be able to reopen when the government signed a peace deal in February, agreeing to the Taliban demand for a system of Islamic courts. However, instead of laying down their arms, as they had promised, the Taliban moved into the neighbouring area of Buner, just 60 miles from Islamabad, prompting American alarm that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could fall into Taliban hands.

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It is hard to beleive the government was ignorant of this mistreatment of its citizens. Why would anyone want to live under such conditions? I also question why the paper has not published the photos of the Taliban abuse. They certainly would not hesitate if they were pictures of renegade US troops hazing prisoners. Here there are pictures of real torture and abuse and they are too sensitive to show them? Does not the world have a right to see what a wicked enemy we are fighting?