(Karachi) Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai returned to her native Pakistan on Tuesday to visit flood victims, almost ten years to the day after the Taliban bombing that nearly killed her.
Posted at 7:51 a.m.
This visit comes on the same day that thousands of people gathered in her hometown to denounce the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, the same group that had tried to kill her and who are coming back in force these months, after having lost influence for several years.
Malala was 15 when, on October 9, 2012, members of the TTP burst into the bus taking her home from school and shot her in the head for daring to campaign for girls’ education in its Swat Valley (northwest).
Received emergency treatment in Great Britain, she then became a global symbol of resistance to religious extremism and the voice of girls deprived of education, then in 2014 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history.
Malala, who resides in Britain and had already returned to Pakistan in 2018, arrived with her father in Karachi on Tuesday. She was to travel to surrounding rural areas affected by catastrophic flooding caused by monsoon rains.
She thus seeks to “maintain the attention of the international community on the impact of the floods in Pakistan and to insist on the need for emergency humanitarian aid”, indicated in a press release her organization, Malala Fund.
Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, has been hardest hit by the floods, which Pakistani officials have blamed in part on climate change.
A third of the country was found under water, eight million people were displaced, two million homes destroyed or damaged and 1,500 hospitals and clinics ravaged. The damage is estimated at 28 billion dollars and a health crisis now threatens the displaced.
Malala was born and raised in Mingora, in the conservative Swat Valley, which the TTP held between 2007 and 2009, at the start of its insurgency against the Pakistani state.
The group committed countless attacks that bloodied Pakistan between its creation in 2007 and 2014. Then weakened by military operations, it has been back in force for more than a year, galvanized by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021.
A distinct group from the Afghan Taliban, but driven by the same ideology and a long common history, it has increased attacks in recent months, mainly targeting security forces and former anti-Taliban militiamen.
Peace negotiations between the TTP and Islamabad launched in May in Kabul, under the mediation of the Afghan Taliban, are currently at a standstill.
More than 5,000 people blocked the main road through Mingora on Tuesday to protest against an attack on a school bus the day before, in which the driver was killed and a student in his 10s was injured.
The TTP denied responsibility and police said they were investigating the killers’ motives.
Students and teachers decided not to attend classes on Tuesday, including at Malala’s former school, founded by her father, to spread a message of peace.