'I am on the Kill List'

“Stop trying to kill me.”

That’s the message a man from Waziristan, Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan, has brought to the UK this week, saying that the U.S. has targeted him for death by placing him on the so-called kill list.

In an op-ed published Tuesday at the Independent, tribal elder Malik Jalal explains he’s in England “because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.”

He was invited by Ken MacDonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions, to speak to British parliamentarians this week. As for a U.S. visit, Jalal told BBC, “I don’t trust America and I won’t go there. I came to Britain because I feel like Britain is like a younger brother to America. I’m telling Britain that America doesn’t listen to us, so you tell them not to kill Waziristanis.”

Jalal says he works for the North Waziristan Peace Committee (NWPC), and it’s because of the group’s success towards negotiating peace in the area that the U.S. has targeted him, he told BBC.

“I had a peaceful role in Pakistan. I’m not involved in terrorism,” he said, countering the U.S. assessment of the NWPC as a group that provides safe haven for Taliban. But negotiating with the group is fundamental, he writes, and points to British negotiations with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). “There has hardly ever been a time when terrorists have been brought back into the fold of society without negotiation. Remember the IRA; once they tried to blow up your prime minister, and now they are in parliament. It is always better to talk than to kill.”

Jalal describes four instances in which he believes he was target of a drone strike, each of which he says killed innocent civilians. His suspicion of being on the kill list was confirmed by local security sources, he writes, which “leaves me in no doubt that I am one of the hunted.”

“I don’t want to end up a ‘Bugsplat’—the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized,” Jalal writes.