Pakistani education and rights activist, targeted by Taliban, arrives in capital Islamabad amid tight security.
Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has arrived home in Pakistan for the first time since being shot by Taliban gunmen in an assassination attempt five years ago.
The 20-year-old, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel prize, landed in the capital Islamabad early on Thursday morning.
Television footage showed her sitting alongside her parents in an airport waiting lounge and, later, travelling in a security convoy into the city.
Yousafzai was shot in the headby Taliban gunmen in October 2012 for speaking out against their ban on girls education in her native Swat Valley, in Pakistan’s north.
READ MORE
The fight for education in Pakistan’s Swat
Two other students were wounded in that attack.
After receiving emergency medical treatment in Pakistan, she was shifted to the United Kingdom for specialised medical procedures, where she has resided ever since due to fears for her security if she returned to Pakistan.
Following the attack, the Pakistani Taliban vowed to kill her if she ever returned.
Details of Yousafzai’s itinerary are not being made public due to security concerns, the AFP news agency reported, but she is expected to meet with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and others.
Focus on education
Since recovering from her wounds, Yousafzai has championed the cause of education across the globe, speaking out passionately at the United Nations and other fora for the right of all children, and particularly young women, to receive an education.
In 2013, she and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a teacher and rights activist, founded the Malala Fund, which champions the right of every girl to 12 years of free and safe education. The organisation focuses on working in conflict zones, with programmes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and countries hosting Syrian refugees.
It is unclear if Yousafzai will visit her native Swat valley, where she made her name as a young rights activist, writing a series of anonymous blogs for the BBC while the valley was under Taliban rule in 2009.
Pakistan’s military fought a protracted battle to retake the scenic rural valley, eventually displacing the Taliban from Swat that year.
Attacks such as the one that targeted Yousafzai, however, continued for several years, with the Taliban exacting revenge on those who stood up to them during their reign.
In 2016, Taliban commanders attempted to extort money from local traders, sparking fears that they were attempting to launch a comeback in Swat, which was home to current Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah.
“I really miss my friends and family. But I also miss the landscape,” Yousafzai told Pakistani publication Mangobaaz in an interview earlier this week.
“When I woke up in the hospital in the UK, I looked outside and asked the doctors where are the mountains and rivers. Swat Valley is a paradise on Earth and I don’t think I fully appreciated its beauty until it wasn’t outside my window every day.”
Yousafzai currently attends Oxford University, where she is pursuing a Bachelors degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
ALJAZEERA
