A trip for his compatriots. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai arrived in Pakistan, her native country, on Tuesday to visit the victims of the floods, ten years almost to the day after the attack committed by the Taliban which almost cost her her life.
Malala was 15 when, on October 9, 2012, members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, burst into the bus taking her home from school and shot her in the head to having dared to campaign for the education of girls in his valley of Swat (north-west).
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, before becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2014. story.
The impact of floods
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.
The violence denounced
Malala’s visit comes as students at her former school in her hometown of Mingora joined a strike to denounce the upsurge in violence in the area. On Monday, a school bus driver was killed and a 10-year-old student injured in an attack, prompting around 2,000 students and teachers to suspend classes. The population suspects the TTP, which has denied any responsibility.
The TTP once had control, between 2007 and 2009, of the Swat Valley, at the start of its insurrection against the Pakistani state, before being driven out by intense army operations. A distinct group from the Afghan Taliban, but driven by the same ideology and a long common history, it has come back in force in recent months in northwestern Pakistan, increasing attacks, mainly against security forces.