Pakistani children haunted by the deluge

 There were so many rumors,” said 11-year-old Mehboob, one of the millions of people who fled their homes in south Punjab. “We did not know where we would go or what we would do.”

His family traveled all day, piled into a tractor and trailer, to escape the floods which swept down from the north four weeks ago and washed away his home that night. Unlike the north-west, where most of the estimated 1,600 people who died were killed, south Punjab had warning of the coming floods -- enough for most of its villagers to escape, but not enough to carry their belongings with them.

Nor indeed for the children to escape the trauma of fleeing in panic. “On the loudspeakers in the mosques, they were saying ‘there is water coming, you should all leave,’” said 10-year-old Rukhsar, who like Mehboob now spends her days in a centre run by UNICEF and other charities in the village of Kot Addu. “I thought we were all going to drown,” she adds.

On the wall is a picture in black crayon drawn by an older student, showing a small house floating away on giant waves. Big raindrops fall from clouds above. “We put that picture up to encourage them to speak, because when the children first came here the trauma was too great for them to talk about it,” explains an assistant.

Pakistani children who survived heavy flooding live in miserable conditions at a roadside in Nowshera, near Pesharwar, Pakistan. Of the 20 million people affected by floods, children are the most at risk. Even ordinary illnesses like chicken pox and measles spread rapidly amongst children crammed together in camps. On top of that they face dysentery from contaminated water, malaria and skin infections. The children in this center are among the lucky ones. They have been given food and medicine; they have been cleaned up and have somewhere to go during the day.

Elsewhere in south Punjab, Reuters reporters have seen mothers and children crowded together in hospitals and makeshift clinics. In one school building in another district of the region,several children sat together with their mothers on one hospital bed alongside a baby hooked up to an IV drop -- and that in a room which also doubled up as a crowded out-patient clinic. Yet even the children in the day center are trapped between the nightmare of the slowly receding floods and an uncertain future -- their family homes destroyed and farmland submerged.

“These children are showing in their eyes a trauma I have seldom seen before,” says Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF, after a visit to the school. He added that he had noticed that pictures drawn by young girls often showed their dolls who had been left behind. Mehboob, whose family has just returned to the area, has been back to see where his house once stood. Nothing remains. “We are very sad and my mother cried. My elders tell me this is the will of God; these things happen, what can we do?” he says. “We are still scared of the water, but if our home is rebuilt, we want to go back home.”

Rukhsar’s family has already gone back to their house. The roof and one of the walls have fallen down but the rest has survived. “Our house can fall down any minute but we have nowhere else to go,” she said.

Pakistan air raids kill up to 45 militants

Pakistani government air raids have killed up to 45 militants, their family members and other civilians with no ties to the fighters, officials said on Wednesday. Three strikes on Tuesday night targeted Pakistani Taliban militants in one of their strongholds in the Tirah Valley in the northwestern Khyber region on the Afghan border. “We have reports that 40 to 45 terrorists were killed,” a security official told Reuters. Taliban insurgents often deny official death tolls of militants.

Pakistani forces have stepped up air strikes in Khyber and adjoining Pashtun tribal lands in recent months against activists who fled military offensives in the Taliban strongholds of Swat and South Waziristan bordering Afghanistan last year. Air strikes could undermine efforts to win over civilians for the fight against the Taliban. “Some of the families were living in the vicinity of these hideouts and they were also among the dead,” said the security official. Rehan Khattak, a senior government official in Khyber, said six civilians, including women and children, were killed in one of the strikes and they had nothing to do with militants. “Four people were also wounded. They were members of Kokikhel,” Khattak told Reuters, referring to a pro-government Pashtun tribe which dominates Khyber.

Anar Bacha, 32, one of the wounded, said they were innocent. “We are going to our home in a cab when all of a sudden planes appeared and began targeting us,” he said. “We are innocent. We are Kokikhels. We are not terrorists.”

In April, up to 50 members of the same tribe were killed in an air raid in Tirah after they were mistaken for Taliban, prompting an apology from Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani. Khyber is a key route for US and allied convoys carrying supplies for troops fighting militants in Afghanistan. Fighters frequently attack these convoys, forcing the United States to look at developing alternate routes. Peshawar Reuters