Ten years after a Taliban assassination attempt on her life, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai visited flood victims in her native Pakistan on Tuesday.
Thousands of people protested in her hometown, where the same violent organisation is once more on the rise, during her visit, which is only the second since she was transported to Britain for life-saving treatment.
Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban when she was just 15 years old because of her support for girls’ education. The Pakistani Taliban is an independent group with ties to the Afghan Taliban.
She arrived in Karachi on Tuesday, two days after the attack’s tenth anniversary, from where she would proceed to regions that saw tremendous monsoon flooding.
She is travelling to ‘help sustain international attention on the impact of floods in Pakistan and underscore the need for urgent humanitarian aid,’ according to a statement from her organisation, the Malala Fund.
Eight million people were forced to leave their homes due to catastrophic flooding, which also cost an estimated $28 billion in damages. A third of Pakistan was submerged.
Yousafzai was born and nurtured in the Afghan border town of Mingora in the fervently Islamic Swat Valley.
The Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), waged an insurgency there for several years before it was put an end by a brutal military operation in 2014.
However, since the Afghan Taliban retook control of Kabul last year, unrest has increased.
In recent weeks, the TTP has taken credit for dozens of strikes, many of which targeted security personnel and anti-Taliban elders.
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