'No one wants us to speak'

Sons are expected to carry on a family’s name, its lineage. I don’t have any more sons. Both my sons, Noorullah and Saifullah, were killed on Dec 16. Today, it’s just me, my husband and our three daughters in one house.

Noorullah was a student of class nine. Saifullah was in grade eight. I brought them up with a lot of love. Before my children were born, I had worked as a nurse at a local hospital, but I gave up my day job to take care of them. Since my husband was serving in the Pakistan Army at that time, we were often shuffled around, posted from one place to another. Nothing mattered more to me then ensuring that my children enrolled in good schools.

Noorullah, as he grew up, insisted on doing his O Levels rather than matriculation. So, I began working again to support his ambitions. When I would come home every night, my children would hang up their uniforms and help me in the kitchen. Noorullah would make rotis - beautiful, round rotis. Saifullah would serve us tea.

There were struggles even then, but there was happiness. Now, there is none.

Both me and my husband are from a small village. For our children, we wanted a better life, so we brought them to the city, to Peshawar. We thought they would be safe here. We were wrong.

It’s been three years. We are still asking for justice. Me, my husband and the other parents have reached out to everyone: the media, the politicians and the officers. But, it seems, no one wants us to speak. Even the media does not run our complete statements.

No one is ready to accept full responsibility. Neither the federal government, nor the provincial government, nor the Pakistan Army. They act as if the Army Public School was not even in Pakistan.

But I am not giving up. I promise you we will go to the United Nations for justice, if we have to.

I want answers. Who have they prosecuted and hanged? I don’t know who these men were or what they did exactly. When were they caught? From where? How do we know these men were not already in jail? If you read the profiles of some of them, you can easily tell that they were caught in 2010. What about the facilitators? The men who led the terrorists to our children, to my sons, where are they?

This is my house, even though I am a woman, if I am at the gate nobody will dare to enter it.

It seems like everyone we speak to is reading out a script. We killed so and so. We hanged so and so. Be happy. They tell us that nine serving army officers were also terminated after the attack.

When we met Lieutenant General Hidayat-ur-Rehman (the former corps commander of Peshawar) he admitted that the investigation report is confidential and will not be shared.

My sons could have been someone had they lived. They were both very intelligent. Saifullah enjoyed taking electronic machines apart and then putting them together. I still have the torch he made out of an old mobile phone. Two days before becoming a martyr, he was asked by an aunt what he wanted to be. He said, “I will become a pilot and then take my parents for Hajj.”

My girls keep telling me, let’s leave. Let’s go to another country. I tell them, I cannot leave my sons behind.

No one knows what a mother, like me, has to live through everyday. Do you know how I found my sons from amongst a pile of bodies? I recognised my youngest from his shoes. I had bought him those shoes, they were new. My eldest I found after an army officer handed me his cell phone.

People say that they will never forget our children. But you will, after a while. Me, even if I try, I cannot forget what happened to my sons.

Don’t just hold programmes to honour our dead children. Guard our country. Guard our children.

Falak Naz is the mother of Noorullah, 14, and Saifullah Durrani, 13, martyred on Dec 16 in the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. Her story is written here as narrated to Aftab Ahmad.