Faheem Qureshi was 14 when a drone attack on his home left him with horrific injuries, several family members dead and his dreams for the future in tatters
Qureshi remembered thinking to himself in his hospital bed during the anxiety of his month-long blindness: “What did I do for which I was punished so badly? What did my family do? Why did it happen to me?”
The available evidence suggests the strike was an error. 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,” Qureshi said, “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.”
