The survivor of Obama’s first-ever drone strike in January 2009 has opened up out about life after the strike that changed his life irrevocably.
Faheem Qureshi, almost 14 years old at the time, was celebrating the return of his uncle from United Arab Emirates (UAE) at his home in Ziraki village, North Waziristan, when a missile hit his house. His body on fire, Qureshi ran out of the house, wanting to throw water on his burning eyes.
As far as Qureshi is concerned, all he knows about Obama “is what he has done to me and the people in Waziristan, and that is an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone programme,” Qureshi said while speaking to Guardian from Islamabad.
The strike, ordered by Obama on the third day of his presidency, reportedly did not hit the Taliban but caused the hidden civilian damage of a counter-terrorism tactic employed by the US.
Following the incident, Qureshi spent 40 days in several hospitals. Shrapnel had punctured his stomach and lacerations covered much of his upper body. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. They could not save his left.
More bad news awaited the boy as he recuperated. Two of Qureshi’s uncles, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, were dead. So was his 21-year-old cousin Aizazur Rehman Qureshi, who was preparing to leave for work in the UAE. Fourteen of Qureshi’s cousins were left fatherless.
The teenager, a good student who wanted to pursue a career in Chemistry, was suddenly tasked with providing for his family – mother, brothers and sisters. The family never had the money to repair the guest lounge.
Seven years have gone by since the strike, but Qureshi and his family have yet to receive even an admission from the US that the strike ever happened. Although Obama expressed “profound regret” for a 2015 drone strike on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed two western hostages, the White House would not comment on “specific cases”.
“Are we not the same human beings as these two westerners who were killed?” Qureshi asked in his first interview with an American journalist. The interview was facilitated by the human rights group Reprieve.
Qureshi, now 21-years-old, wants acknowledgement, an apology and compensation from the US. “It’s not about me. It’s about every civilian who has been killed in Waziristan.”
Since Obama took office, 371 drone strikes in tribal areas of Pakistan have killed between 256 and 633 civilians, according to a media-derived tally kept by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The 21-year-old, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, is now a displaced person, having stayed in Ziraki until the Pakistani army invaded North Waziristan 18 months ago.
Qureshi recalls his thoughts during his month-long blindness spent at the hospital, “What did I do for which I was punished so badly? What did my family do? Why did it happen to me?”
Reporter Daniel Klaidman’s book about Obama’s drone strikes, Kill or Capture, claims that the first January 2009 strike had gone “terribly wrong”, with the targeted Taliban member never having been on the premises.
A leaked Pakistani government document records “9 civilians” being killed in a drone strike on 23 January 2009, an apparent reference to the one on Qureshi’s home; an unredacted version seen by the Guardian names his village and his dead uncle.
“There are so many people like me in Waziristan that I know of who were targeted and killed who had nothing to do with militancy or the Taliban, so many women who have been killed, children who have been killed, but there is still no answer to this. Forget about the answers, there is not even acknowledgement that we were killed,” Qureshi said.
“I do not say drones have only killed civilians. They would have or might have killed some militants. But overall, they have killed mostly civilians who have nothing to do with what America is trying to do in Pakistan or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world,” he added.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s tally, Obama’s drone strikes in tribal Pakistan alone have killed between 66 and 78 children.
Since the drone strike that brought so much suffering in the young man’s life, Qureshi has sought recompense through various official channels, via the Pakistani tribal liaison, the US embassy and the United Nations Human Rights Council. All in vain.
Realising that he will never be a chemist, Qureshi hopes to sponsor his two younger brothers’ education by opening a small business one he is allowed to return to Waziristan. “I don’t know how they can study if I can’t provide for them,” he said.
The 21-year-old advocates negotiations with the Taliban instead of Obama’s framework that the US response to terrorism must choose between drone strikes and ground invasions.
“What we know of the US is this is what they do to people like me. They uproot us, they kill us, they target us, without any reason. They turn our lives upside down. Of course the US is hated in that part of the world, and it’s hated more because of what they’ve done to people like me,” Qureshi said.
The young man added that he did not believe ordinary Americans are evil or unjust, and urged them not to believe what their government tells them about drone strikes and Pakistan.
