AS IF HELL FELL ON ME.THE HUMAN RIGHTS CRISIS IN NORTHWEST PAKISTAN

Amnesty International Full PDF report Link: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/RMOI-86A2WE/$File/full_report.pdf The Taleban came here and settled here. Now they have a dispute with the government, and the government started taking actions against them. If we stand with the government the Taleban will hit us. If we stand with the Taleban the government will target us. If we don't stand with any of them, you can see how bad our situation is. It's going from bad to worse. Northwest Pakistan has been in the grip of a human rights and humanitarian crisis since 2004, when groups broadly aligned with the Taleban movement of Afghanistan began asserting control in the seven 'agencies' that comprise the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and adjoining areas in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The mountainous terrain of FATA borders Afghanistan, adjoining the NWFP, which also shares some of its border with Afghanistan. (The NWFP was renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in April 2010, but NWFP persists among officials, locals and observers, and is used in this report to avoid confusion.) Based on Amnesty International's conservative analysis of credible, publicly available information, more than 1,300 civilians were killed in the course of the conflict in northwest Pakistan in 2009. The Pakistan-based Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, have both estimated more than 11,000 casualties. PIPS estimated that at least 1,565 civilians were killed in insurgent attacks alone in FATA and NWFP in 2009.2 Given the lack of information from many areas of northwest Pakistan, it is quite likely that the true number of civilians killed is significantly higher. In total, more than 8,500 people have died in the violence in northwest Pakistan in 2009, a sharp escalation from the previous year.3 Multiple accounts of battles and conflict zones provided to Amnesty International would suggest that this ratio of casualties understates the harm to civilians, but more detailed analyses must await better information, particularly from the Pakistani military. What is indisputably clear is that the range and ferocity of the conflict has risen considerably in the past two years.