Editor-DN
Islamabad, Pakistan:
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai said she was “compelled” to return to her native Pakistan on Saturday, as she arrived to attend a global summit on girls’ education in the Islamic world. The education activist was shot dead by Pakistani Taliban militants in 2012 when she was a school student, and has returned to the country only a few times since then.
“I am really honoured, overwhelmed and happy to be back in Pakistan,” he told AFP as he arrived at the conference in the capital Islamabad with his parents.
The two-day summit brings together representatives from Muslim-majority countries, where millions of girls are out of school.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif was scheduled to address the audience, including local schoolgirls and university students, on Saturday morning.
“Finally we have made a good move on the education of Muslim girls,” said Zahra Tariq, 23, who is studying clinical psychology.
“Those living in rural areas still face problems. In some cases their families are the first hurdle,” he told AFP.
Yousafzai is scheduled to address the summit on Sunday, and said she will focus on Afghanistan — the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from attending school and university.
“I will be speaking about protecting the right of all girls to go to school, and why leaders should hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against Afghan women and girls,” she posted on social media platform X on Friday. should.”
Pakistan’s education minister, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, told AFP that the Taliban government in Afghanistan had been invited to participate, but there had been no response from Islamabad.
Since returning to power in 2021, the Afghan Taliban government has implemented a strict version of Islamic law that the United Nations has called “gender discrimination.”
According to official government figures, Pakistan faces its own education crisis with more than 26 million children — one of the highest figures in the world — mostly the result of poverty.
Yousafzai became a household name after Pakistani Taliban militants attacked a school bus in the remote Swat Valley in 2012.
At the time, militancy was widespread in the region as war broke out between the Afghan Taliban and NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan Taliban are separate groups but have close ties and similar ideologies, including a strong disbelief in educating girls.
Yousafzai was expelled from Britain after her attack and became a global advocate for girls’ education and, at age 17, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
