On April 5, 2012, Khalid Wazir, profiled in the magazine in 2004, was assassinated in the main market of Bannu, the ancient city that lies along the border between Pakistan’s settled territory and the unsettled tribal region roughly the size of Vermont. Wazir was a high-ranking tribal leader, called a Khan Bahadur, in North Waziristan. He was shot to death while traveling in a car along with his aide, a man named Noorali.
Wazir occupied the almost impossible position of leading his fellow members of the Pashtun tribe, the Wazirs, while negotiating between U.S. military interests in the region and the more and more powerful insurgents. Since late 2001, his village of Jani Khel has teetered along a main jihadi highway between Afghanistan’s battlefields and Pakistan. His assailants, although unknown, are suspected to be members of the Taliban. Wazir’s murder is only the latest in a nearly decade-long campaign by insurgents to target and destroy members of civil society—including journalists, teachers, and elders—who do not support their rule in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, or anywhere else. Since the tribal areas are virtually impossible for outsiders to enter, the death toll from both the Taliban’s targeted assassinations and the Pakistani military’s campaign against the insurgents remain a figure of speculation.
The information blackout created by this campaign benefits the Taliban’s enemies as well. Villagers from Wazir’s region of Jani Khel report that many homes have been destroyed and villagers wounded and killed by U.S. drone strikes. In 2012, Pakistan won the dubious distinction of being the world’s most fatal country for journalists for the second year running. Of all journalists, those who report from the tribal areas have suffered the highest death rates. Among them, Hayatullah Khan, who worked with the New Yorker on the 2004 article I wrote about Wazir, was assassinated by unknown gunmen in 2006. He was shot in the back while returning to his home in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, after reporting on the use of U.S. hellfire missiles in Waziristan. His photographs contradicted official reports by Pakistan and the United States about military action in the region.
According to Islamic tradition, Wazir was buried immediately in Peshawar, not in Jani Khel, to avoid further attacks by the increasingly powerful Taliban, which now governs much of this borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Photograph: Thir Khan/AFP/Getty Images
