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Forgotten victims of Pakistan’s Taliban war

Shadi Khan was once a proud soldier fighting the Taliban, but today he quivers in pain, socks bagged around metal pins after a bomb blew off his legs on Pakistan’s deadliest battlefield.
His unit had arrested 10 Taliban operatives and killed another eight, and was heading back to base camp in South Waziristan when the bomb exploded. That was August 2010. He is still in hospital.
“It was as if I had been shot. It was a huge pain. Both my legs were
blown up and I was injured in the stomach. I was conscious for the whole thing, but after around three hours I passed out,” he says.
One soldier was killed and Khan was the most seriously wounded out of four who were evacuated to a field hospital. He’s since had multiple operations and both his legs have been amputated above the knee.
“Now I’ll go home and just connect to my God. I’ll remember him. I’m still young, but I can’t walk at my home, where the land is rough. What else can I do? Perhaps I can teach students, if I can get a job in any school.” Under US pressure to root out Taliban and al Qaeda-linked networks in its northwest and districts on the Afghan border, more than 2,795 Pakistani soldiers have been killed in fighting since 2004. Another 8,671 have been wounded.
Those official statistics overshadow the more than 2,403 foreign, mostly American, soldiers who have been killed in 10 years in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s war has also ignited revenge bombings that have killed another 4,200 people since July 2007, destablising the nuclear-armed country and forcing the establishment to fight hard against homegrown Taliban.
Khan is a patient at Pakistan’s Armed Forces Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine (AFIRM) in Rawalpindi, the country’s only hospital of its kind that helps maimed and disabled soldiers rebuild their shattered lives.

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