DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan, (Reuters) – A 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl campaigner shot by the Taliban had defied threats for years, believing the good work she was doing for her community was her best protection, her father said yesterday.
Malala Yousufzai was shot and seriously wounded on Tuesday as she was leaving her school in her hometown in the Swat valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad.
The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying her promotion of education for girls was pro-Western and she had opposed them.
The shooting has outraged people in a country seemingly inured to extreme violence since a surge in Islamist militancy began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
“She is candle of peace that they have tried to blow out,” said one Pakistani man, Abdul Majid Mehsud, 45, from the violence plagued South Waziristan region.
In the Swat valley, a one-time tourist spot infiltrated by militants from Afghan border bases more than five years ago, her family and community are praying for her survival.
Her father, Ziauddin Yousufzai, who ran a girls’ school, said his daughter had wanted to go into politics.
He said that of all the things he loved about her, it was her fairness – her democratic ideals – that he loved the most.
Malala, then a dimpled 11-year-old with dark eyes, shot to fame when she wrote a blog under a pen name for the BBC about living under the rule of the Pakistani Taliban.
The militants, led by a firebrand young preacher, took over her valley through a mixture of violence, intimidation and the failure of the authorities to stand up to them.
Even after the military finally went into action with an offensive in 2009 that swept most of the militants from the valley, it remained a dangerous place.
Malala didn’t keep quiet. She campaigned for education for girls and later received Pakistan’s highest civilian prize.
Her prominence came at a cost.
“We were being threatened. A couple of times, letters were thrown in our house, that Malala should stop doing what she is doing or the outcome will be very bad,” her father, sounding drained and despondent, said by telephone.
But despite the threats, he said he had turned down offers of protection from the security forces.
“We stayed away from that because she is a young female. The tradition here does not allow a female to have men close by,” he said.
“NEVER FEARFUL”
Malala had spent many sleepless nights kept awake by gunfire, had been forced to flee her home with her two younger brothers and walked past the headless bodies of those who defied the Taliban.