PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN—Khwazhamina Wazir—or aday (Pashto for mother), as everyone calls her—is over 80. As you pull up to her home in Dera Ismail Khan, a tired, dusty city located approximately 190 miles from Peshawar, in November 2019 peals of laughter, the bleating of goats, and the sound of children playing in the afternoon sun break the silence. Inside the dwelling, made up of six ramshackle rooms built around a small courtyard, men are nowhere to be found; the ones in her family are either dead, in prison, or missing.
Wazir sat on a rickety charpai bed in the courtyard, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren surrounding her. The eldest was 18, a girl who said she wanted to move to Peshawar to study medicine. The youngest, a 1-year-old boy, was the son of one of Wazir’s sons, Ali Wazir, a member of parliament who had recently been released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for his alleged involvement in an attack on a military checkpoint in May 2019.
