Militancy: 1200 schools closed in Swat

by Abudlhadi Hairan    November 25, 2007

According to a report published on BBC’s Urdu website, the ongoing fighting between the militants and Pakistani security forces has resulted into the closure of more than 1200 schools in Swat.

The report adds that the militants have seized the district and some nearest areas where they use schools and hospitals as their jails and torture centers. Girls’ schools were closed even before the militants took control because they had threatened to blow them and kill the girls.

It means that the population, considered more educated and more civilized among the Pashtoons, is now totally deprived of education as the report too suggests that education was the most affected during the four-week long tension.

The other day a local newspaper in Peshawar published a letter written by a female student from Swat saying that the militants have destroyed their life by closing educational institutions and jailing girls in their homes.

She, a B.A. student, wrote that it was her dream to complete her education before her marriage, which was expected next year, but all the educational institutions forced to close and girls threatened to not attend any school, college or university which ruined her life and career and wasted one precious year.

According to the BBC report, more than 200,000 students were studying in these schools. The private-owned schools, it adds, and their students are not included in these figures because collecting their information about them is a difficult job due to strict fighting in the area.

The militants, led by a pro-Taliban Mullah Fazlullah, want to impose their self-declared sharia of killing and beheading people for shave, education, polio, music, games and other ‘un-Islamic’ things. They recruit young students in their madrassas for suicide attacks and force the population to follow the way of life they (the militants) want. They get weapons and money from some ‘hidden forces’ and target security forces. This led both the militants and forces to a strict fighting in which hundreds of people so far have been killed and thousands of them have fled the area.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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