By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: May 6, 2009
MARDAN, Pakistan — The dank and shadowed hallways of the Mardan Tuberculosis Hospital, crumbling relic of another age, were transformed here on Wednesday into a clinic of a more modern sort, when the refugees of nearby battles came streaming in the whole long day.
Hundreds first, then, thousands; tattered, woebegone, well dressed. They piled into the hospital courtyard, then into the hospital itself, moving down the hallways, sitting on the floors. It was mostly men who came but women did, too, nearly all of them lost and bewildered and wondering what fate awaited them next.
“Reza Mohammed, mother of five,” said a voice behind a burqa; she was seated on the floor. She was offering her government identification card to an official in a chair. The hall was dark without electricity. “We came six days ago. Please take down my name.”
The refugees like Ms. Mohammed are fleeing the battles that are now unfolding across a 50-mile arc northwest of the Pakistani capital, where the army, following months of indecision, has begun waging offensives against the Taliban militants who have seized control. The men and women who gathered at the hospital said they were fleeing fighting in Dir, Buner and Swat, three mountainous districts where the Pakistani Army has chosen to confront the militants.
Government officials here say that about 40,000 people have already left and that a half million might ultimately be forced to run. That day seemed to come closer on Wednesday. The Pakistani Army reported fighting the Taliban in two places: in Swat, where they claimed to have killed 35 militants, and in Buner, where they said they killed 27. Those reports could not be independently verified, in part because the government has banned reporters from the area.
The Mardan Tuberculosis Hospital, built by Danish missionaries in 1907, was besieged by the refugees early on Wednesday when government officials declared it a place where refugees could sign up for food and other help.
By late afternoon more than 2,000 people, most of them new arrivals, had passed through.
But the needs seemed far greater than that, and encompassing far more than just bags of wheat and cans of cooking oil. More than 22,000 refugees have asked for help in Mardan alone, and most of them in the past 10 days. Watching the crowds swell, it was not difficult to imagine the problem growing worse, quickly, should the fighting intensify.
“We are overwhelmed here,” said Amir Zeb, the director of the hospital. Mr. Zeb said that the Pakistani government was dispatching a group of employees from the Education Department to pitch in, and that the United Nations High Commission on Refugees was also sending a team. For the moment, he and his tiny staff were all but alone.
The refugees who gathered at the hospital milled in silent clusters round the yard and on the steps, many wearing the gazes of men whose own lives they no longer controlled. A powerful smell rose from these groups and clouds of flies swarmed about their faces. No one bothered to swat them away.
Mughdi Khan, 50, arrived 10 days ago from Matta, a town in Swat that has become a Taliban fortress. His eyes were pale blue, and on his head he wore a pakol, the flat beret favored by many Pashtuns. Mr. Matta was twice cursed. He and his family of nine first fled the fighting that engulfed Swat late last year, then returned in February when the government signed a peace deal with the militants, granting them permission to impose Islamic-style law. The peace proved a sham, with the Taliban fighters, many of them under the command of a man named Mullah Fazlullah, continuing to terrorize the remaining government officials. On Sunday, the militants seized control of Mingora, Swat’s district capital.
So Mr. Khan was a refugee again.
“If you do something wrong, if you miss your prayers or something like that, the Taliban will flog you in the street,” he said. “We are Muslims. We don’t have much problem with people trying to enforce the religion — it’s when they cut the throats of the policemen that people become angry. Yes, they are doing that.”
Like many refugees gathered here, Mr. Khan was reluctant to criticize either the Taliban or the army directly. Mr. Zeb, the hospital director, said many of the refugees he had interviewed Wednesday blamed the Taliban for the current calamity. When the fighters claimed to want nothing more than the imposition of Islamic law, they had the support of many of the locals, Mr. Zeb said. But now that they had proved they wanted more, that they wanted to dominate or expel the Pakistani government, many have withdrawn their support.
“People are angry,” Mr. Zeb said, “and now they blame the Taliban.”
It seemed certain that things would get worse in the coming days. Some of the refugees said that the army had imposed a round-the-clock curfew in many of the embattled areas, preventing thousands of people from leaving. This, despite the fact that the government in Islamabad was urging the people in Swat to flee from an imminent operation against the Taliban. If the curfew is lifted, the refugees said, many thousands more would come.
Still, some of the refugees milling about the tuberculosis hospital raised doubts about the agenda of the Pakistani Army. Some even echoed the widespread view, commonplace in Washington, that the Pakistani Army, or least elements of it, had not merely failed to combat the militants, but had colluded to make them stronger.
“In some places the Taliban and the army are a stone’s throw away,” said Mohammed Javed, who fled his job as an armed guard for Doctors Without Borders in Mingora. “They are just looking at each other, not doing anything. We are ordinary people, and we do not understand.”
“It’s a game,” a man shouted over Mr. Javed. “The Taliban are never killed. Only civilians are.”
And so it went for most of the day here, the refugees, powerless, wondering about events that were tearing up their lives.
Mr. Khan, the two-time refugee from Swat, ended a long conversation by reaching into his pocket and producing a 20-rupee note. It is worth about 25 cents; the only money he had.
“God will not let me starve,” he said. “But I will speak the truth.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 7, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
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