I Am Malala Read online

  At Eid we usually sacrifice animals like goats or sheep. But Fazlullah said, ‘On this Eid two-legged animals will be sacrificed.’ We soon saw what he meant. His men began killing khans and political activists from secular and nationalist parties, especially the Awami National Party (ANP). In January 2007 a close friend of one of my father’s friends was kidnapped in his village by eighty masked gunmen. His name was Malak Bakht Baidar. He was from a wealthy khan family and the local vice president of the ANP. His body was found dumped in his family’s ancestral graveyard. His legs and arms had all been broken. It was the first targeted killing in Swat, and people said it was because he had helped the army find Taliban hideouts.

  The authorities turned a blind eye. Our provincial government was still made up of mullah parties who wouldn’t criticise anyone who claimed to be fighting for Islam. At first we thought we were safe in Mingora, the biggest town in Swat. But Fazlullah’s headquarters were just a few miles away, and even though the Taliban were not near our house they were in the markets, in the streets and the hills. Danger began to creep closer.

  During Eid we went to our family village as usual. I was in my cousin’s car, and as we drove through a river where the road had been washed away we had to stop at a Taliban checkpoint. I was in the back with my mother. My cousin quickly gave us his music cassettes to hide in our purses. The Taliban were dressed in black and carried Kalashnikovs. They told us, ‘Sisters, you are bringing shame. You must wear burqas.’

  When we arrived back at school after Eid, we saw a letter taped to the gate. ‘Sir, the school you are running is Western and infidel,’ it said. ‘You teach girls and have a uniform that is un-Islamic. Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you.’ It was signed, ‘Fedayeen of Islam’.

  My father decided to change the boys’ uniform from shirt and trousers to shalwar kamiz, baggy pyjama-like trousers and a long shirt. Ours remained a royal-blue shalwar kamiz with a white dupatta, or headscarf, and we were advised to keep our heads covered coming in and out of school.

  His friend Hidayatullah told him to stand firm. ‘Ziauddin, you have charisma; you can speak up and organise against them,’ he said. ‘Life isn’t just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide. You can stay there accepting everything from the Taliban or you can make a stand against them.’

  My father told us what Hidayatullah had said. He then wrote a letter to the Daily Azadi, our local newspaper. ‘To the Fedayeen of Islam [or Islamic sacrificers], this is not the right way to implement Islam,’ he wrote. ‘Please don’t harm my children because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren.’ When my father saw the newspaper he was very unhappy. The letter had been buried on an inside page and the editor had published his name and the address of the school, which my father had not expected him to do. But lots of people called to congratulate him. ‘You have put the first stone in standing water,’ they said. ‘Now we will have the courage to speak.’

  10

  Toffees, Tennis Balls and the Buddhas of Swat

  FIRST THE TALIBAN took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history. One of our favourite things was going on school trips. We were lucky to live in a paradise like Swat with so many beautiful places to visit – waterfalls, lakes, the ski resort, the wali’s palace, the Buddha statues, the tomb of Akhund of Swat. All these places told our special story. We would talk about the trips for weeks beforehand, then, when the day finally came, we dressed up in our best clothes and piled into buses along with pots of chicken and rice for a picnic. Some of us had cameras and took photographs. At the end of the day my father would make us all take turns standing on a rock and tell stories about what we had seen. When Fazlullah came there were no more school trips. Girls were not supposed to be seen outside.

  The Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and stupas where we played, which had been there for thousands of years and were a part of our history from the time of the Kushan kings. They believed any statue or painting was haram, sinful and therefore prohibited. One black day they even dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha, which was carved into a hillside just half an hour’s drive from Mingora and towered twenty-three feet into the sky. Archaeologists say it was almost as important as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Afghan Taliban blew up.

  It took them two goes to destroy it. The first time they drilled holes in the rock and filled them with dynamite, but that didn’t work. A few weeks later, on 8 October 2007, they tried again. This time they obliterated the Buddha’s face, which had watched over the valley since the seventh century. The Taliban became the enemy of fine arts, culture and our history. The Swat museum moved its collection away for safekeeing. They destroyed everything old and brought nothing new. The Taliban took over the Emerald Mountain with its mine and began selling the beautiful stones to buy their ugly weapons. They took money from the people who chopped down our precious trees for timber and then demanded more money to let their trucks pass.

  Their radio coverage spread across the valley and neighbouring districts. Though we still had our television they had switched off the cable channels. Moniba and I could no longer watch our favourite Bollywood shows like Shararat or Making Mischief. It seemed like the Taliban didn’t want us to do anything. They even banned one of our favourite board games called Carrom in which we flick counters across a wooden board. We heard stories that the Taliban would hear children laughing and burst into the room and smash the boards. We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.

  One day we found our teacher Miss Hammeda in floods of tears. Her husband was a policeman in the small town of Matta, and Fazlullah’s men had stormed in and some police officers had been killed, including her husband. It was the first Taliban attack on the police in our valley. Soon they had taken over many villages. The black and white flags of Fazlullah’s TNSM started appearing on police stations. The militants would enter villages with megaphones and the police would flee. In a short time they had taken over fifty-nine villages and set up their own parallel administrations. Policemen were so scared of being killed that they took out adverts in the newspapers to announce they had left the force.

  All this happened and nobody did a thing. It was as though everyone was in a trance. My father said people had been seduced by Fazlullah. Some joined his men, thinking they would have better lives. My father tried to counter their propaganda but it was hard. ‘I have no militants and no FM radio,’ he joked. He even dared to enter the Radio Mullah’s own village one day to speak at a school. He crossed the river in one of the metal boxes suspended from a pulley that we use as makeshift bridges. On the way he saw smoke so high it touched the clouds, the blackest smoke he’d ever seen. At first he thought it might be a brick factory, but as he approached he saw bearded figures in turbans burning TVs and computers.

  In the school my father told the people, ‘I saw your villagers burning these things. Don’t you realise the only ones who will profit are the companies in Japan, who will just make more?’

  Someone came up to him and whispered, ‘Don’t speak any more in this way – it’s risky.’

  Meanwhile the authorities, like most people, did nothing.

  It felt as though the whole country was going mad. The rest of Pakistan was preoccupied with something else – the Taliban had moved right into the heart of our nation’s capital, Islamabad. We saw pictures on the news of what people were calling the Burqa Brigade – young women and girls like us in burqas with sticks, attacking CD and DVD shops in bazaars in the centre of Islamabad.

  The women were from Jamia Hafsa, the biggest female madrasa in our country and part of Lal Masjid – the Red Mosque in Islamabad. It was built in 1965 and got its name from its red walls. It’s just a few blocks from parliament and the headquarters of ISI, and many govern
ment officials and military used to pray there. The mosque has two madrasas, one for girls and one for boys, which had been used for years to recruit and train volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was run by two brothers, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, and had become a centre for spreading propaganda about bin Laden whom Abdul Rashid had met in Kandahar when visiting Mullah Omar. The brothers were famed for their fiery sermons and attracted thousands of worshippers, particularly after 9/11. When President Musharraf agreed to help America in the ‘War on Terror’, the mosque broke off its long links with the military and became a centre of protest against the government. Abdul Rashid was even accused of being part of a plot to blow up Musharraf’s convoy in Rawalpindi in December 2003. Investigators said the explosives used had been stored in Lal Masjid. But a few months later he was cleared.

  When Musharraf sent troops into the FATA, starting with Waziristan in 2004, the brothers led a campaign declaring the military action un-Islamic. They had their own website and pirate FM station on which they broadcast, just like Fazlullah.

  Around the same time as our Taliban were emerging in Swat, the girls of the Red Mosque madrasa began terrorising the streets of Islamabad. They raided houses they claimed were being used as massage centres, they kidnapped women they said were prostitutes and closed down DVD shops, again making bonfires of CDs and DVDs. When it suits the Taliban, women can be vocal and visible. The head of the madrasa was Umme Hassan, the wife of the elder brother, Abdul Aziz, and she even boasted that she had trained many of her girls to become suicide bombers. The mosque also set up its own courts to dispense Islamic justice, saying the state had failed. Their militants kidnapped policemen and ransacked government buildings.

  The Musharraf government didn’t seem to know what to do. This was perhaps because the military had been so attached to the mosque. But by the middle of 2007 the situation was so bad that people began to worry the militants could take over the capital. It was almost unbelievable – Islamabad is usually a quiet, orderly place, very different to the rest of our country. Finally on the evening of 3 July commandos with tanks and armoured personnel carriers surrounded the mosque. They cut off the electricity in the area, and as dusk fell there was a sudden burst of gunfire and explosions. The troops blasted holes in the wall surrounding the mosque and fired mortars at the compound as helicopter gunships hovered overhead. Over loudspeakers they called for the girls to surrender.

  Many of the militants in the mosque had fought in Afghanistan or Kashmir. They barricaded themselves and the madrasa students inside concrete bunkers with sandbags. Worried parents gathered outside, calling their daughters on mobile phones, begging them to come out. Some of the girls refused, saying their teachers had taught them that to become a martyr is a glorious thing.

  The next evening a small group of girls emerged. Hidden among them was Abdul Aziz, disguised in a burqa, along with his daughter. But his wife and younger brother stayed inside, along with many students, and there were daily exchanges of gunfire between the militants and the troops outside. The militants had RPGs and petrol bombs made from Sprite bottles. The siege went on until late on 9 July, when the commander of the special forces outside was killed by a sniper in one of the minarets. The military finally lost patience and stormed the compound.

  They called it Operation Silence although it was very loud. Never had there been such a battle in the heart of our capital. Commandos fought from room to room for hours until they finally tracked Abdul Rashid and his followers to a basement where they killed him. By nightfall on 10 July, when the siege was finally over, around a hundred people had been killed including several soldiers and a number of children. The news showed shocking pictures of the wreckage, everywhere blood and broken glass, and dead bodies. We all watched in horror. Some of the students at the two madrasas were from Swat. How could something like that happen in our capital city and in a mosque? A mosque is a sacred place for us.

  It was after the Red Mosque siege that the Swat Taliban changed. On 12 July – which I remember because it was my birthday – Fazlullah gave a radio address that was quite different to his previous ones. He raged against the Lal Masjid attack and vowed to avenge the death of Abdul Rashid. Then he declared war on the Pakistani government.

  This was the start of real trouble. Fazlullah could now carry out his threats and mobilise support for his Taliban in the name of Lal Masjid. A few days later they attacked an army convoy travelling in the direction of Swat and killed thirteen soldiers. The backlash wasn’t just in Swat. There was an enormous protest by tribesmen in Bajaur and a wave of suicide bombings across the country. There was one ray of hope – Benazir Bhutto was returning. The Americans were worried that their ally General Musharraf was too unpopular in Pakistan to be effective against the Taliban so they had helped broker an unlikely power-sharing deal. The plan was that Musharraf would finally take off his uniform and be a civilian president, supported by Benazir’s party. In return he would drop corruption charges against her and her husband and agree to hold elections, which everyone assumed would result in Benazir becoming prime minister. No Pakistani, including my father, thought this deal would work as Musharraf and Benazir hated each other.

  Benazir had been in exile since I was two years old, but I had heard so much about her from my father and was very excited that she would return and we might have a woman leader once more. It was because of Benazir that girls like me could think of speaking out and becoming politicians. She was our role model. She symbolised the end of dictatorship and the beginning of democracy as well as sending a message of hope and strength to the rest of the world. She was also our only political leader to speak out against the militants and even offered to help American troops hunt for bin Laden inside Pakistani borders.

  Some people obviously did not like that. On 18 October 2007 we were all glued to the TV as she walked down the steps of the plane in Karachi and wept as she stepped onto Pakistani soil after almost nine years in exile. When she paraded on an open-top bus through the streets, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to see her. They had travelled from all over the country and many of them were carrying small children. Some released white doves, one of which flew to perch on Benazir’s shoulder. The crowds were so large that the bus moved at a walking pace. We stopped watching after a while as it was clearly going to take hours.

  I had gone to bed when just before midnight the militants struck. Benazir’s bus was blown up in a wave of orange flame. My father told me the news when I woke up the next morning. He and his friends were in such a state of shock that they had not gone to bed. Luckily, Benazir survived because she had gone downstairs to an armoured compartment to rest her feet just before the explosions, but 150 people had been killed. It was the biggest bomb ever to have gone off in our country. Many of the dead were students who had made a human chain around the bus. They called themselves Martyrs for Benazir. At school that day everyone was subdued, even those who had opposed Benazir. We were devastated but also thankful that she had survived.

  About a week later the army came to Swat, making lots of noise with their jeeps and helicopters. We were at school when the helicopters first arrived and were very excited. We ran outside and they threw toffees and tennis balls down to us, which we rushed to catch. Helicopters were a rare sight in Swat, but since our house was close to the local army headquarters they sometimes flew right over us. We used to hold competitions for who would collect the most toffees.

  One day a man from along the street came and told us that it had been announced in the mosques that there would be a curfew the next day. We didn’t know what a curfew was and were anxious. There was a hole in the wall to our neighbours’ house, Safina’s family, through which we used to communicate with them, and we knocked on the wall so they would come to the hole. ‘What does it mean this curfew?’ we asked. When they explained, we didn’t even come out of our rooms because we thought something bad might happen. Later the curfew took over our lives.

  We heard on
the news that Musharraf had sent 3,000 troops into our valley to confront the Taliban. They occupied all government and private buildings which they thought were of strategic importance. Until then it had seemed as if the rest of Pakistan was ignoring what was happening in Swat. The following day a suicide bomber attacked another army truck in Swat, killing seventeen soldiers and thirteen civilians. Then all that night we heard dar dar dar, the boom of cannons and machine guns from the hills. It was hard to sleep.

  On the TV the next day we heard that fighting had erupted in the hills to the north. School was closed and we stayed at home, trying to understand what was going on. The fighting was taking place outside Mingora though we could still hear gunfire. The military said it had killed more than a hundred militants, but then on the first day of November around 700 Taliban overran an army position at Khwazakhela. Some fifty men deserted from the Frontier Corps and another forty-eight were captured and then paraded around. Fazlullah’s men humiliated them by taking their uniforms and guns and giving them each 500 rupees to make their way back. The Taliban then took two police stations in Khwazakhela and moved on to Madyan, where more police officers gave up their weapons. Very quickly the Taliban controlled most of Swat outside Mingora.

  On 12 November Musharraf ordered 10,000 more troops into our valley with additional helicopter gunships. The army was everywhere. They even camped on the golf course, their big guns trained on the hillsides. They then launched an operation against Fazlullah which later became known as the first battle of Swat. It was the first time the army had launched an operation against its own people outside the FATA. Police once tried to capture Fazlullah when he was speaking at a gathering, but a giant sandstorm blew up and he managed to escape. This added to his mystery and spiritual reputation.