Lost childhood

Rebel with a cause

Zubair A. Dar  

When this most dreaded boy of central Kashmir was carried home, the shroud enveloping his body was stained red. Nine hours is a long gun battle but he was not killed inside the shrine where he was hiding – anxious troops fired at him indiscriminately even as he lay unconscious, outside the shrine. Mustafa Khan was dead at 19 – five years after he had first picked up a Kalashnikov rifle. 

The troops wanted to kill him at all costs. So when the men in olive cordoned off Goigam village, 23 kilometers from Srinagar on July 30 in 2001, they didn’t stop when they found him hiding in a shrine along with two other militants. Ordinarily, the troops avoid an encounter with militants in shrines. They asked him to surrender. He didn’t. And soon, Khan was encircled by hundreds of guns – all of them targeting him.

The village mourned him – not because he was a brave fighter but for the painful tales of his lost childhood. Mustafa Khan’s journey from an innocent child to a deadly militant is a legend in the villages across central Kashmir. It’s a perfect script for a Bollywood blockbuster. 

“Mustafa’s uncle was a militant, who had a confrontation with a political worker in the village. Mustafa was caught in that controversy. He was only 13 then,” says Tariq Lone, Mustafa Khan’s childhood friend and classmate. “But Ikhwanis (Counter Insurgents) used to harass him. They came regularly to his house.” (In Kashmir of 1996, several surrendered militants had joined forces with army to fight militants, and came to be known as Ikhwanis.) 

Then one day that year, a grenade was hurled on the Ikhwanis – Ama Kana and Muma Kana – in the village. Both survived the attack. Rumours went around that Mustafa was behind the attack. But the Kanas retaliated with might. “They came to our house looking for my son. They found him and I began to plead for mercy. They misbehaved with me, even beat me and pushed me to the ground,” recalls Shameema Begum, Khan’s mother. It was this incident that changed Mustafa’s life entirely. “He hit one of the Ikhwanis with a radio and dared him to touch his mother again,” adds Lone, who believes that the incident had tested the threshold of Mustafa’s tolerance. 

Mustafa Khan was arrested in early 1996. He spent the next few months in security forces’ camps. The 13-year-old boy would play his games no more. He was a detainee, ‘dangerous for peace and security of the general public’. “I remember him feeding kittens. He had three of them as pets. He even stitched a dress for a puppy. He said that he felt a chill when he saw the poor puppy getting drenched in the rain,” describes Lone. “In the fields, he would play-act Tipu Khan’s last attempt to flee.” (Tipu, a militant, had been shot dead while trying to escape on horse-back some years ago.) At the camp, however, playing fields were out of bounds. Besides his own torture, Mustafa had to witness cruelties that would always haunt him. “He was made to sponge down the blood-soaked vehicle in which Shakeel was tortured to death,” Shakeel’s brother, Ghulam Ahmad Bhat, remembers Mustafa telling him. Shakeel, Mustafa’s childhood friend, had joined militant ranks and was eventually arrested from Badran village while Mustafa was in the Barzulla army camp near his village. “Three days after his arrest, we recovered Shakeel’s body from the fields. It was April 4 in 1996. Whenever I met Khan, he would talk about the incident,” says Bhat. 

Mustafa Khan was finally released from the 34 Rashtriya Rifles camp in Beerwah town of central Kashmir, some 17 kilometers from his village. He had been transferred there from Barzulla camp. “But the Ikhwanis asked him to report to them at the camp every month and bring his mother along when he came on August 1 that year,” says Khan’s father, Abdul Razak Khan, a shawl trader in those days. “At home, I advised my son not to indulge in any suspicious activity. He would not speak a word, except asking ‘why should my mother go to the army camp?’” 

Three days before the August 1 meeting, Khan left his house in the morning and did not return. He was, instead, trekking the high altitude along the LoC to reach the other side for weapons training. He had joined the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. He returned some months later, planned attack after attack on army camps across central Kashmir with Ikhwanis as his prime target. People believe that a suicide bombing on the 34 RR camp at Beerwah – Ikhwanis camped there – had been planned by the teenager. 

As a silent appreciation of Mustafa’s fight against the counter insurgents, thousands attended his funeral after he was killed in the gun-battle. He didn’t kill Ama Kana – the counter insurgent was killed days before Khan returned from Pakistan. But his resolve to fight other counter insurgents remained alive. “Mustafa Khan told me that he’d made it a point to give the counter insurgents a tough time,” says Bhat. 

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