When my daughter draws, the page fills quickly with color. She draws houses with crooked windows and oversized doors. She draws trucks with pink wheels. She draws flowers everywhere – on roofs, on roads and, sometimes, floating in the sky. Children do not draw with realism but with imagination. A truck can carry flowers. A cloud can be purple. The world, in their hands, is generous and forgiving. Watching her paint, I sometimes remember another little girl who once sat beside me in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan during the five years I was held captive there. Her name was Fatima.

She was 4 or 5 years old when I met her. She had been adopted by Muhammed Ali after her father, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan militant leader Usman Odil, was killed in a drone strike. Muhammed Ali was the man who held me captive. Like most children, Fatima followed the adults everywhere, wandering through compounds with the quiet confidence of someone who believed she belonged. It was only later, after a drone strike forced my captors to move me, that I came into contact with the other children. I was taken inside Muhammed Ali’s home. A small jail had been built there specifically to keep me hidden from outsiders. It was more secure, but also more domestic. For the first time in years, captivity unfolded not only among fighters but inside the rhythms of a household.

Children moved through the courtyard outside my cell. They played with stones and sticks in the shadow of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. Armed men argued about doctrine and war while children ran past them laughing, repeating the same jokes that made their parents smile. And sometimes, they came to sit beside me. Fatima liked to draw. One afternoon she sat next to me with a piece of paper and a pencil. She began sketching a truck. I leaned over and, without thinking much about it, drew a flower on the side of the truck. It seemed harmless. Something to make her smile. Instead, she became angry. She looked at the drawing in frustration. “You ruined it,” she said. I tried to calm her, confused by the intensity of her reaction. But she was inconsolable. “Now no one will take me seriously,” she said angrily.

Freedom, I assumed, would bring closure. But freedom has a way of reopening questions that captivity once forced into silence.

Freedom, I assumed, would bring closure. But freedom has a way of reopening questions that captivity once forced into silence.

The truck, she explained, was meant for a suicide attack. She was 4 or 5 years old. At the time, I absorbed the moment the way one absorbs so many strange things in captivity, quietly and without fully processing what it meant. The world around me was already distorted by violence. A child crying about a drawing seemed small compared with the larger dangers that surrounded us. But years later, as a father, the memory returned to me with a different weight. Fatima was not playing. She was rehearsing a world that had been written for her. She was learning the language of martyrdom before she could properly read. Then there was Fateh, a quiet boy who spent long afternoons sitting beside me. He liked to talk about food and animals, the kinds of things children talk about when they have not yet learned to filter the world through ideology. When my captors tortured me, when they pulled out my fingernails, it was Fateh who later sat with me and fed me by hand because I could not lift the food myself. He was a child performing an act of tenderness in the middle of brutality.

I often wonder what became of him. I know that his mother, whom I called Aya Jaan, was killed in front of me. Fateh grew up in the shadow of a father who was himself a militant leader. I fear the boy who once fed me may have become the kind of man who once guarded me. There was Zakia, a girl who clung to me after her family was killed before her eyes. She was 7 or 8 then – old enough to understand loss, too young to understand the world that had caused it. In that environment, grief was rarely processed. It was redirected. Children learned early that sorrow had a script: revenge, honor, sacrifice. I suspect that by the age of 12 or 13, Zakia was married off – her childhood over before it had properly begun.

There was Haseena, who had striking blue eyes and an open, curious face that reminded me, years later, of my youngest son. During an attack on our convoy, a Taliban fighter shot her in the eye. She survived. But survival in that world was never simple. Every injury became another chapter in a story about enemies and destiny. And there was Muhammed Tahir, Fatima and Zakia’s brother. I remember him most vividly because I watched him learn to walk. One day, during a bombing, I had been forced to wear a hijab and hide so that no one would recognize me as a foreign hostage. The boy toddled into the room and instinctively climbed into my arms, burying his head in the folds of my shirt as explosions echoed in the distance. He stayed there until the bombing stopped. Later, I heard him speak his first words. In captivity, time moves strangely. Moments stretch and collapse in unpredictable ways. Years blur together, but certain images remain perfectly sharp.

Children’s faces are among the things that remain. When I finally escaped and returned home, I thought the hardest part of my life was behind me. Freedom, I assumed, would bring closure. But freedom has a way of reopening questions that captivity once forced into silence. Today I am a father to three children, a daughter and two sons. Watching them grow has forced me to reconsider those years in ways I could not before. Children, I have learned, absorb the world around them with astonishing speed. The stories they hear, the fears they witness, the values they see rewarded, all of it becomes the architecture of their future. My children are growing up in a world where trucks carry groceries and flowers mean celebration. Fatima grew up in a world where trucks carried bombs and flowers could ruin a mission. I do not know what became of most of the children I knew in captivity.

Some of them are likely adults now. Some may have become fighters, shaped by the same narratives that shaped their fathers. Some may have become brides in their familiar circle of militant families. Some may have disappeared into the quiet anonymity that war leaves behind. And some may no longer be alive. I miss them in ways that are difficult to explain. They helped keep me alive during the darkest years of my life. They brought moments of laughter into a place defined by fear. They reminded me, even in captivity, that innocence still existed. But I also carry a quiet fear. The children who helped save me may have become the very thing that once kept me captive. War does this. It blurs the lines between victim and participant. It takes children who might have become artists, teachers or engineers and gives them instead a script written in blood and loyalty. When my daughter finishes a drawing, she sometimes holds it up proudly and asks me what I think.

I always tell her it’s beautiful. Sometimes she draws flowers on trucks. And every time she does, I think of a little girl who once cried because a flower ruined her suicide attack. I escaped my captors years ago. But the children of that world may still be living inside the prison that raised them. And that is a captivity far harder to escape.

The writer is the author of Lost to the World: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Five Years in Terrorist Captivity. He was kidnapped weeks after the assassination of his father, who was governor of the Punjab, Pakistan.

© Daily Times