Malala makes first visit to hometown Barkana since being attacked

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai on Wednesday visited her hometown Barkana in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Shangla district for the first time since being shot by the Taliban in 2012.

Malala was shot in the face by the Pakistani Taliban when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, amid her campaigning for female education rights. Her activism earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, and she has since become a global advocate for women’s and girls’ education rights.

Her most recent visit to Pakistan was in January when she spoke at a summit in Islamabad on girls’ education in Muslim nations and emphasised that women living under the Taliban system were in a “gender apartheid”.

Malala, who belongs to Shangla, has been living in the United Kingdom since October 2012.

The Nobel laureate on Wednesday met her family members in Barkana and visited their ancestral graveyard. She also met with her uncle, Ramazan, who recently underwent surgery in Islamabad after suffering from heart problems.

Karora Station House Officer (SHO) Amjad Alam Khan told media.com that she arrived in Barkana via helicopter and was accompanied by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, and her husband, Aseer Malik, who she married in 2021.

SHO Khan said Malala also visited the school and college she had established in Barkana in 2018 to provide free education to approximately one thousand girls in the district, which previously had no functional government girls college.

“Malala met students, inspected classes and spoke to students while urging them to study and make their future brighter,” the SHO said, adding that the Malala Fund would ensure a high standard of education at the college free of charge to promote education.

Malala also visited the home of her maternal family, Faiz Ahmad, and met family members.

Also present on the occasion was education activist Shahzad Roy, who runs the Shangla Girls School and College under Zindagi Trust. He briefed her about the facilities provided by the college.

She returned to Islamabad after her short visit.

Malala’s first visit to Pakistan since being shot was in 2018.

Following that, the Nobel laureate visited Pakistan in 2022 to travel to areas devastated by unprecedented monsoon flooding and met its victims.