A tricycle-motor is coming down a desert-road in the province of Uruzgan. A man in his thirties is driving and in the load-bed a 28-month-old seriously ill boy is wrapped in blankets. The man is the boy’s uncle and bringing him to hospital. The uncle halts for a quick roadside talk with people that an overhead drone (unmanned aerial vehicle) identifies as Taliban. 15 minutes back on the road the tricycle gets a direct hit from special forces, the uncle dies on the spot. the boy sustains lethal injuries and dies some days later.
The drone crew and the special forces never detected the bundled-up boy on their video-images. A terrible incident, but it hides a further story.
Upon investigation (to establish whether we could assist the boy’s family) we found that the boy’s parents hadn’t been able to bring the boy to hospital themselves as both the father and mother are mentally disabled. The couple and their children live with their extended family who look after them in an isolated village known to be a Taliban hotbed. The killed uncle had indeed been a Talib, other family-members actively assist and host Taliban fighters in their houses.
The exact extent of the parents’ disability is unknown; there are no psychiatrists or psychologists in Uruzgan who can properly examine them or offer any hope of treatment and professional care. Neither is there any way to provide children whose families engage with the Taliban with a safe alternative. Otherwise healthy adults can choose to support the Taliban, whether that is a completely free choice or a forced decision depends on background, culture, religious convictions, economics and geography. Who definitely don’t have a choice though are the mentally disabled couple: they do not live with the Taliban out of any choice and their 28-month-old son was not being transported by an active Talib by free choice, however loving their family and the visiting Talibs may be.
The couple have other sons as well, but one or two of these boys will likely end up on the other side of the border with Pakistan in a Taliban madrassa. As one of my staff explains: the family feels an ‘urgency’ to have at least one of the boys ‘serve the faith’ for his blessed parents. ’Blessed’ being an interesting choice of word as the family went on complaining about the huge burden upon them…With hundreds of very young children populating the Taliban madrassas of North Pakistan where they are promised flowers raining down from heaven and eternal life after detonating themselves as suicide-bombers, it is a very sad promise this boy’s future holds.
Concepts of freedom and choice when it comes to the Taliban or other Islamist groups are a laden topic and it is impossible to know how the parents may have chosen if healthy. It is heart-rending though to realise how trapped those weakest in this fight for survival so often really are.
