Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai at the Karachi airport. —Courtesy our correspondent
Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has reached Pakistan to help flood victims.
She landed at the Karachi airport amid strict security, Geo News reported Tuesday morning. Malala’s parents are also visiting with her.
The Pakistani education rights icon last visited Pakistan nearly four years ago in 2018. It was the first time she returned home to her native Swat Valley after being shot by the Taliban there.
In October 2012, Malala — then 15 years old — was shot in the head at point-blank range by Taliban gunmen as she was returning from her school in the Swat Valley.
She suffered bullet injuries and was admitted to the military hospital Peshawar but was later flown to London for further treatment. The shooting drew widespread international condemnation.
She has become an internationally recognised symbol of resistance to the Taliban’s efforts of denying women education and other rights.
In 2014, Yousafzai became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17 in recognition of her efforts for children’s rights.
The Nobel laureate has now returned to the country for the second time to provide help to the affected people in the flood-hit areas of Sindh.
Who is Malala
Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley in what is now the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. She is the daughter of Ziauddin and Tor Pekai Yousafzai and has two younger brothers.
At a very young age, Malala developed a thirst for knowledge. For years her father, a passionate education advocate himself, ran a learning institution in the city, and school was a big part of Malala’s family. She later wrote that her father told her stories about how she would toddle into classes even before she could talk and acted as if she were the teacher.
In 2007, when Malala was ten years old, the situation in the Swat Valley rapidly changed for her family and community. The Taliban began to control the Swat Valley and quickly became the dominant socio-political force throughout much of northwestern Pakistan. Girls were banned from attending school, and cultural activities like dancing and watching television were prohibited. Suicide attacks were widespread, and the group made its opposition to a proper education for girls a cornerstone of its terror campaign. By the end of 2008, the Taliban had destroyed some 400 schools.
Determined to go to school and with a firm belief in her right to an education, Malala stood up to the Taliban. Alongside her father, Malala quickly became a critic of their tactics. “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” she once said on Pakistani TV.
