PAKISTAN: School Attacks Spark Fears of a Lost Generation of Girls

The Taliban have renewed attacks on girls' schools in northwest Pakistan, stoking fears of a fresh terror campaign against women.

Militant groups have been "waiting and watching" as Pakistan reels from the effects of the worst floods in living memory, an intelligence source told The Times. The bombing of two girls' schools within days and a series of deadly blasts at Shia religious processions have raised fears that they are now making their move.

A girls' primary school was destroyed in Kalam in the Swat Valley, a former Taleban stronghold, last Friday. The attack, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility, was the first of its kind since the militants were flushed from the area by the Pakistani Army last year.

A girls' high school in the Landi Arbab area of Peshawar was bombed on Monday. Gunmen also killed a woman teacher in the Bajaur tribal region.

No children were hurt in the school blasts but, with hundreds of schools already destroyed by the floods, concerns are rising that a fresh generation of Pakistani girls will be denied an education.

When the militants ruled the Swat Valley they destroyed hundreds of girls' schools, forcing 40,000 young women to give up their education, in a campaign led by Maulana Fazlullah, the Taliban chief in the area. He also banned television, ordered men to grow beards and paraded the corpses of his victims in public.

His rule left the children of Swat deeply traumatised. "Children are imitators and, to them, militants with guns have power and kudos. Many are terrified of the militants returning but determined to be as powerful as the Taliban when they're older," an NGO worker said.

Those children are now coming to terms with how the floods tore apart schools only just rebuilt after the militants destroyed them.

In testimony gathered by an NGO in Swat and passed to The Times, Bushra, 13, described seeing her school being washed away. "I saw buildings being uprooted and carried away. I looked on as my school was destroyed," she said.

"I like studying and want to be a doctor. But now I go to the madrassa on Sunday and work at home helping my mother. I'm bored. While the militants were here ... we were forbidden from going to school. I sat at home and missed my classroom and all my school friends. I spent most of the time thinking about the last days we were all at school together."

There are fears that women's literacy rates, already dismal, will suffer further. The literacy rate for men in Swat is 42 per cent. Among women it is less than 13 per cent, according to the last government census in 1998.

Across Pakistan at least 7,820 schools have been destroyed, forcing more than 1.6million children out of their classrooms, analysts believe. Pakistani security officials admit that the troops holding the Swat Valley are severely stretched as they deliver aid to victims of the floods, which submerged an area the size of England.