A father’s misery: The burden of a son dying a militant

Shahzad and his other sons were picked up by the army for questioning in Oct 2009.

ISLAMABAD: Shahzad* has the greatest burden to bear: the knowledge that his son was responsible for the deaths of innocent people and may well have carried out murders himself.

“We weren’t rich but we weren’t going hungry either … I still can’t understand why he would do that,” he says, as if trying to find logic that very moment.

Shahzad’s identity card reveals he’s in his mid-fifties, but one could easily mistake him for being at least two decades older.

Long, unruly strands of hair reach to his shoulder, as if washing and brushing are unfamiliar concepts to him. The wrinkles on his face are the first tell-tale sign of the old man’s miseries.

About a year ago, Shahzad moved to Islamabad from Dir, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, with his wife and four of his five children to make a living as a taxi driver. His fifth child is dead.

His son, Shahzad says, was a member of the local Taliban, operating under the command of Maulana Hafizullah and was killed in a shootout with military forces in 2009. The story of how Shahzad went from a grieving, confused parent to a virtual fugitive trying to escape his past life, involves arrest and mental torture. He hopes his trauma ends with redemption.

Shahzad is hesitant to talk about exactly where in Dir he used to live. However, he freely talks about his plight after his “militant” son was killed.

“The military picked me and my other sons up in October 2009 and they questioned my wife. I couldn’t tell them too much about my (militant) son because he had left home.” That, according to Shahzad, was not good enough. He says he was kept in custody for over two months.

During his incarceration, Shahzad was frequently denied food and water. He says he was kept in a tiny cell and didn’t have a bed or pillow. His interrogators were harsh, frequently insisting that he was lying and that he knew all about his son’s militancy even suggesting that he was part of the Taliban. The best thing Shahzad could say about his detention was that he wasn’t physically abused in any way.

At some level, Shahzad believes he deserved what happened to him. Although he didn’t know for sure that his son had joined a militant group, he admits he had “strong suspicions” which he chose to ignore. “In Dir, back then, if your son just left home that meant he had joined the Taliban.”

Despite all the confused emotions he feels towards his dead child, Shahzad admits he feels a fair amount of anger towards the army, saying people like his son could have been rehabilitated rather than killed.

Now, Shahzad can be found standing next to his cab at the same spot in Aabpara, every day. He talks freely to other taxi drivers and even some of his fares about his experiences. The last few years have been hard on Shahzad, but he’s trying to move on, knowing all the while that he will never be able to forget.

*Name has been changed to protect privacy

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th,  2011.