We all said surahs from the Quran and a special prayer to protect our sweet homes and school. Then Safina’s father put his foot on the pedal and away we drove out of the small world of our street, home and school and into the unknown. We did not know if we would ever see our town again. We had seen pictures of how the army had flattened everything in an operation against militants in Bajaur and we thought everything we knew would be destroyed.
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 their own homes. They became voluntary IDPs. It was an astonishing example of Pashtun hospitality. We were convinced that if the exodus had been managed by the government many more would have died of hunger and illness.
As we had no relatives in Mardan we were planning to make our way to Shangla, our family village. So far we had driven in the opposite direction, but we had had to take the only lift we could get out of Swat.
We spent that first night in the home of Dr Afzal. My father then left us to go to Peshawar and alert people to what was happening. He promised to meet us later in Shangla. My mother tried very hard to persuade him to come with us but he refused. He wanted the people of Peshawar and Islamabad to be aware of the terrible conditions in which IDPs were living and that the military were doing nothing. We said goodbye and were terribly worried we wouldn’t see him again.
The next day we got a lift to Abbottabad, where my grandmother’s family lived. There we met up with my cousin Khanjee, who was heading north like us. He ran a boys’ hostel in Swat and was taking seven or eight boys to Kohistan by coach. He was going to Besham, from where we would need another lift to take us to Shangla.