Angry and fear in Pakistan after the bombing of a girls’ school near the Afghan border

May 9, Islamabad  In northwest Pakistan, a girls’ school was bombed by suspected militants, raising new concerns about the safety of female pupils whose education has long been a target of Islamists.

The bomb went off during the night on Wednesday in the town of North Waziristan close to the Afghan border, partly damaging the privately owned school’s premises, according to local police officer Amjad Suhail.

Nobody was hurt or killed.

For a considerable amount of time, Islamist militants associated with al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani network have made their headquarters in the mountainous town of North Waziristan. Starting in 2014, the Pakistani military launched a series of offensives to drive the Haqqani network from its territory.

The Pakistani Taliban have attacked girls’ schools in the past. They are a separate organization but adhere to the same extreme interpretation of Islam as their Afghan counterparts.

Between 2007 and 2009, when the Pakistani Taliban controlled Waziristan and Swat, the birthplace of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, hundreds of schools were attacked.

When Yousafzai was fifteen years old in 2012, a Taliban gunman got on top of her school bus and shot her in the head because she had publicly opposed the Taliban’s prohibition on females attending school.

The most recent event in North Waziristan was an uncommon attack on a girls’ school that happened a year later. Ali Wazir, a former local lawmaker, said that “it has increased fears.”

After their Afghan counterparts took over Kabul in 2021, the Pakistani Taliban, who have murdered almost 80,000 people in years of bloodshed, have been looking for a way to regroup.