by Wajahat S. Khan
BANNU, Pakistan — Dr. Sameena Khan lays her hand on a new mother’s forehead in the Bakakhel Temporarily Displaced Persons Women’s Hospital, comforting her and occasionally shooing away flies and wasps that buzz through the wards.
“Childbirth in this camp is becoming common. This is not right — this was supposed to be temporary,” Khan said, bemoaning the fate of women like her latest patient, forced to live in this army-made tent city housing 26,000.
“Can you imagine being protected and shrouded your whole life, and then being displaced, and then living in a tent for years?” she said. “With scorpions below, helicopters above and not enough water and food? With your relatives not around … with your children not playing out in their gardens but inside a military fence?”
“That’s the Waziristani woman in a displaced people’s camp,” she added.
Khan is among an estimated 1 million civilians from a conservative region in northwest Pakistan who have been forced from their homes by a massive anti-insurgent operation launched in mid-June. And it is women and girls like Khan and her patients who pay a disproportionate price for the region’s long war on terror.
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