‘I was a brainwashed Taliban suicide bomber but a biology class saved my life’
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Maiwand Banayee still vividly remembers the moment he entered a Pakistani refugee camp as a traumatised 14-year-old.
The air was thick with the call to prayer echoing from some 40 mosques, blasting so loudly that the teenager’s ears “nearly burst”. He felt he’d stepped through a portal into “seventh-century Saudi Arabia”. Alongside his family, Maiwand, then 14, had fled Afghanistan as the violent wars ravaged his homeland.
They had hoped the camp would offer them the sanctuary they had lost, but instead, they walked straight into the lion’s den. In this isolated world, extreme religious doctrine dictated every second of existence. There was no music, no films, no women’s voices, and absolutely no outside influences to shape Maiwand’s developing, bookish mind.
By the time he turned 16, trapped in a state of what he calls “religious psychosis”, he was ready to lay down his life as a suicide bomber. Now 46, Maiwand has captured his harrowing journey in his book, Delusions of Paradise: Escaping the Life of a Taliban Fighter, released in paperback on Thursday.
This coincides with Refugee Week, which sheds light on the plight of those who’ve had to flee their homes under often devastating circumstances, with many forced to find shelter at refugee camps. Speaking with the Mirror, Maiwand described education at the camp he once called home as “ideological echo chambers of the past” where vulnerable, abused boys were methodically groomed for holy war.
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Content retrieved from: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/taliban-suicide-bomber-maiwand-book-37248651.
