Militants Suspected of Bombing Girls’ School in Former Taliban Stronghold in Northwestern Pakistan
An unfortunate incident occurred in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan’s volatile northwest when suspected militants detonated explosives at a girls’ school. The structure sustained significant damage, but fortunately, no injuries were reported in the overnight attack, according to a statement from a local police official on Thursday.
A devastating incident took place on Wednesday night at the sole girls’ school in Shawa, a town located in the North Waziristan district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the border with Afghanistan, as reported by local police chief Amjad Wazir.
According to Wazir, the assailants utilized an explosive device to demolish the private Aafia Islamic Girls Model School, which catered to 150 female students. Additionally, Wazir stated that the school’s guard was assaulted by the insurgents before they hastily departed from the scene.
There was no immediate claim for the attack, but suspicion was likely to fall on Islamist militants who have often targeted girls’ schools in the province in recent years as they believed women should not be educated.
On Thursday, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, strongly condemned the attack, calling it a “despicable and cowardly act that could jeopardize the future of many young and talented girls.”
In a statement, Abdullah Fadil, the UNICEF representative in Pakistan, said the “destruction of a girls’ school in a remote and underserved area is a heinous crime detrimental to national progress.”
He pointed to a statement by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday, declaring an education emergency and pledging to work towards enrolling 26 million out-of-school children.
Pakistan witnessed multiple attacks on girls’ schools until 2019 especially in the northwestern Swat Valley and elsewhere in the northwest where Pakistani Taliban for years controlled the former tribal regions. In 2012, the insurgents attacked Malala Yousafzai, a teenaged student and advocate for the education of girls who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Pakistani Taliban, who are known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, were evicted from Swat and other regions in recent years. TTP is a separate group but an ally of the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.
