Taliban massacre survivor speaks out against hatred
Survivor of 2014 Pakistan school massacre gave up revenge to speak out against hatred
ANGER gnawed at every part of him as 14-yearold Ahmad Nawaz lay in a hospital bed in a strange country, his arm shattered and his heart broken.
Somehow, by hiding, by playing dead, he had survived a devastating Taliban terror attack on his school in Pakistan.
He was badly injured – but 149 of his friends and peers had been massacred, including his little brother Haris, 13, shot in the head as he tried to save a friend.
“There were 36 bomb blasts. I saw friends and teachers killed in front of my eyes. I wish I could have helped. I lay and watched. I couldn’t do anything. That I survived is a miracle,” he says.
But he didn’t know what to do with survival. Lying in Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital three months after the attack on Peshawar Army Public School in December 2014, 6,000 miles away from a life too dangerous to ever return to and without Haris, Ahmad had no idea how to face living.
Initially, he decided it would be by joining the army to fight the Taliban, wreaking revenge.
But, day by day, during the month and a half he lay in that bed, he decided there was a better way to fight. Not to battle hate with hate – to attack the terrorists – but to fight their ideology.
He watched the UK news on the ward with horror as it told of British teenagers joining terror groups here and abroad.
He decided he must convince them extremism was not the answer, by telling his own story, showing how only innocent people suffer in its wake.
A year after the attack, Ahmad was still in pain, but was standing in UK schools, speaking in a new language, and hoping to prevent children from turning to terrorism. Soon he was working with the Home Office, encouraging communities to fight extremism.
And now, as his work continues, he has been nominated for a No2H8Crime Young Upstander Award for his courage.
Speaking with wisdom beyond his years, the 17-year-old says: “I had a lot of time to think in hospital. I thought about those men in my school – ‘Why, why a school?.’ And I realised they wanted to stop young people getting an education, so we could be more easily radicalised. I realised we had to focus less on going after them and more on stopping the ideology.
“Initially, it was hard to keep talking about it. But I felt it was my responsibility, so no other family would suffer like us. I don’t want anyone else to lose a brother.”
Ahmad was in a lecture when around 20 Taliban gunmen entered his school. They paced the floor shooting children dead. Somehow, they only hit Ahmad’s arm and assumed he had been killed. He managed to flee to a changing room where others were hiding, but the men eventually found it. Again, he survived by playing dead, but saw sights he cannot erase.
Ahmad’s parents Mohammad and Samina said: “He has told us as he lay on the floor pretending to be dead, he saw the terrorists throw chemicals on his teacher and set her alight.”
Haris, they said, could have escaped, but had run back in to the school to try and save a friend.
They didn’t dare tell Ahmad of his death for weeks.
The effects of the attack, physical and mental, will never leave Ahmad, he says. A vein was transplanted from his leg into his arm, but only 60% of the feeling has returned.
But he is determined to build a future – a positive one. He goes to school in Birmingham, where the family has made their new home, and is awaiting his GCSE results.
He hopes to go to university and to forge a career with the UN.
“In one school there was a guy about my age who came up to me after I had finished speaking,” Ahmad recalls. “He told me he had been thinking about stuff, terrorist activities. He said I had changed his perspective.”
If that is only one young person Ahmad has stopped from committing terrorist acts, his work has already saved lives.
Initially, it was hard to keep talking about it... But I felt it was my responsibility, so no other family would suffer like us. I don’t want anyone else to lose a brother.
Ahmad Nawaz on why he gives talks about the dangers of extremism