Taliban rob a child of his will to play

Daily Times
KARACHI: Mudassir Khan, aged nine, is playing with his cousins on a street in Sultanabad. Though his cousins seem to be enjoying each and every moment of the game, Mudassir’s face paints a different picture.

His movements lack the freedom visible in the other children. When asked why he is not enjoying the game, he murmurs, “I don’t want to play games.” Khan is one of the thousands of children forced to migrate to Karachi after the military operation was initiated in the area.

His father, Muzammal Khan, steps in to better explain Mudassir’s lack of interest in games. Taking the boy aside, he asks Mudassir to narrate his experiences of the Taliban but the child remains silent. “Once he was playing gulli danda, which was his favorite game, when a Talib slapped him and his friends,” reveals Muzzamil Khan, who used to run a medical store in Mingora.

“My son was not like this at all but the tormenting experiences of the past few months have scarred him deeply,” he adds, still trying to coerce the little boy to share his experiences. Mudassir’s eyes start to well up but casting an annoying look at his father, he manages to murmur, “He was very bad, very bad.”

“I was playing gulli danda when a man with a Kalashnikov and a stick in his hand came up to us. He slapped us because we were playing games of infidels,” he narrates, “The Talib said that infidels have created these games in order to deviate the attention of Muslim children and youth from jihad.” He adds that then the Talib forcefully took him to the mosque and since that day, he has never dared to play a game again.

However, the hatred for the Taliban that Mudassir now harbours was not always present. “They would teach me about religion and prayed five times a day,” he says. However, all that changed when the Taliban started beating up people.

He stated that his madrassah teacher once took his 13-year old schoolmate for jihad training. “Maulana sahib would give sermons on jihad, focusing on stories of the glorious past. That friend of mine wanted to be Muhammad Bin Qasim,” says the green-eyed Mudassir.

It may be noted here that after establishing themselves in the area, the Taliban are forcefully sending children to religious seminaries and mosques. Moreover, though the Taliban are against the modern education system and have destroyed many schools in the area, the son of Taliban spokesperson, Muslim Khan, is enrolled in the pharmacy department of the University of Peshawar, which is a co-education university. More interesting was the reply of Muslim Khan when this was pointed out, as he stated that “the study of medicine is allowed in Islam.”

“He is always nervous and jittery all the time,” Waqma, 28, Mudassir’s burqa-clad mother said, adding that the Mudassir’s face was red for quite some time after that slap.

When contacted for an expert’s opinion over the child’s ordeal, Psychologist Haleem Shah said that the child would not be able to recover any time soon. “If the situation is as the parents describe, it will take months for him to recover and possibly play again,” reckoned Shah.

As the children once again run towards the ground, Mudassir remains with his parents, softly whispering, “I don’t want to play.”