Suicide bombings a torment for Pakistan children

Hours later, he found a plastic jar and dipped the eyeball in the water and started to pick through the rubble to find more.

“I have collected seven eyes but there should be one more. After all, every person has two eyes,” said Mehmood as he showed the jar to a reporter.

“They look beautiful, don't they?” he said in the Meena Bazaar, the once-busy market where a suicide bomber killed 119 people and injured over 200 on October 28.

Indifference to death is increasingly becoming a defence mechanism for psychologically tormented children in Peshawar, where Taliban have killed several hundred people in dozens of suicide bombings over the last two years.

“We are seeing more and more children who show little reaction to death and the dead ones,” Peshawar-based psychiatrist and social worker Dr Khalid Mufti said.

“The other day an 11-year-old child whose father died and brother lost his legs in a recent blast told me that he was waiting for his turn like everyone else in the town,” added Mufti.

“The kid was smiling. You know, this is what the war does to children: it robs them of their innocence.” Some children who have survived a blast or witnessed the devastation are suffering from Hysterical aphonia, a psychological disorder where a person loses his ability to speak by seeing or experiencing a traumatic event.

Many others who have seen the streets littered with blood and severed limbs on television screens have flashbacks.

“They have nightmares and wake up in the night, screaming,” Mufti said. “Our news channels have been rather less responsible. They should avoid airing gruesome scenes.”

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