by OWAIS TOHID
Arshad Khan gave up his aspiration to become a suicide bomber shortly after he barely survived a drone attack in North Waziristan, midway through his militant training. He was 16 years old.
After the attack, the Taliban gave him money for bus tickets and sent him, injured and barely able to walk, back to his home in Karachi, Pakistan. In the ensuing two years, his mother nursed him back to health and worked overtime to send him to high school. He recognizes his narrow escape, but says it’s hard to shake what happened to him.
“I have been caught between life and death,” says the now 18-year-old Mr. Khan, in an interview with the Monitor.
As a former madrasa student-turned-suicide bomber, Khan’s experience is one of the greatest challenges Pakistan confronts. Brainwashed to challenge Pakistan’s status as a secular multicultural state, he was a homegrown terrorist with the ability to put those radical thoughts into deadly action.
Khan is just one of countless young boys recruited by a network of Taliban commanders from the country’s many unregulated religious madrasas. His story highlights the difficult road ahead for Pakistani authorities in ending the war on terror.
“I wanted to be an engineer and a good Muslim by going to school and madrasa both, but they [the Taliban] shattered my ambitions and changed my life,” he says.
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