Ashfaq Yusufzai
Three days ago, Rameela Bibi was the mother of a month-old baby boy. He died in her arms on Jun. 28, of a chest infection that he contracted when the family fled their home in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, where a full-scale military offensive against the Taliban has forced nearly half a million people to flee.
Weeping uncontrollable, Bibi struggles to recount her story.
“My son was born on Jul. 2 in our own home,” the 39-year-old woman tells IPS. “He was healthy and beautiful. If we hadn’t been displaced, he would still be alive today.”
But Bibi does not have the luxury of grieving long for her little boy.
Soon she will have to dry her eyes and begin the grim task of providing for herself and her two young daughters, who now comprise some of the 468,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) seeking refuge from the Pakistan army’s airstrikes on the militant-infested mountainous regions that border Afghanistan.
Launched on Jun. 15, the army’s campaign was partly motivated by terrorist attacks on the Karachi International Airport that killed 18 people in early June.
Having failed since 2005 to flush out the militants from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the army is now focusing all its firepower on the 11,585-square-kilometre North Waziristan Agency, where insurgent groups have enjoyed a veritable free reign since escaping the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan over a decade ago.
Some political pundits are cheering what they call the government’s “hard line” on the terrorists. But what it means for a civilian population already weary from years of war is homeless, hunger and sickness.
Most of the displaced have collapsed, fatigued from hours of travel on dirt roads in 45-degree heat, in massive camps in Bannu, an ancient city in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP) province.