CHAPTER 2

How Could This Be Happening?

I was eleven when the Taliban started bombing girls’ schools throughout the Swat Valley. The attacks happened at night, so at least no one was hurt, but imagine arriving at school in the morning to find it a pile of rubble. It felt beyond cruel.

They had begun cutting our electricity and targeting local politicians. They even banned children’s games. We had been told stories of Taliban fighters who heard children laughing in their homes and burst in to destroy the game. They also bombed police stations and attacked individuals. If the Taliban heard that someone had spoken out against them, they would announce those names on their radio station. And then the next morning, those people might be found dead in Green Square, our city center, often with notes pinned to the bodies explaining their so-called sins. It got so bad that each morning, several bodies would be lined up in the town center, which people started calling Bloody Square.

This was all part of their extremist propaganda. It was working: They were asserting control over the Swat Valley.

My father had been cautioned to stop speaking out on behalf of girls’ education and peace. He didn’t. But he did start varying his routes home in case he was being followed. And I started a new habit: I would check the locks on the doors and windows before I went to sleep each night.

We felt hopeful when the army sent troops to Swat to protect us. But it meant the fighting had come closer. They had a base in Mingora near our home, so I would hear the whirring of helicopter blades cutting the thick air and then look up to see metal hunks filled with soldiers in uniform. Those images, just like Taliban fighters holding machine guns in the streets, became such a big part of our daily lives that my brothers and their friends started playing Taliban versus army instead of hide-and-seek. They would make guns from paper and stage battles and “shoot” at one another. Rather than share idle gossip and talk about our favorite movie stars, my friends and I shared information about death threats and wondered if we’d ever feel safe again.

This was our life now. It was nothing any of us could have ever imagined.

Scary things became normal. We’d hear the big, booming sounds of bombs and feel the ground tremble. The stronger the tremor, the closer the bomb. If we didn’t hear a bomb blast for an entire day, we’d say, “Today was a good day.” If we didn’t hear firearms being shot at night, like firecrackers, then we might even get a good night’s sleep.

How could this be happening in our valley?

Near the end of 2008, the Taliban made a new decree: All girls’ schools would be closed January 15, 2009, or they would risk being attacked. This was an order even my father would follow, because he could not put his students—or his daughter—at risk.

By then, I had begun to write a blog for BBC Urdu that later helped the world beyond our country learn our story and the truth of the attack on girls’ education in Pakistan. I had written about how the walk to school, once a brief pleasure, had become a fear-filled sprint. And how at night, my family and I would sometimes huddle on the floor, as far away from the windows as possible, as we heard bombs exploding and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns in the hills surrounding Mingora. I missed the days when we had picnics in that same countryside. What was once our refuge was now a battleground.

Many girls stopped attending classes or left the area to be educated elsewhere when the ban was announced—my class of twenty-seven had dwindled to ten. But my friends and I continued going until the last day. My father postponed what would have been winter break so we could get in as much school as we could.

When the day came that my father was forced to close our girls’ school, he mourned not only for his students but also for the fifty thousand girls in our region who had lost their right to go to school. Hundreds of schools had to close.

We had a special assembly at school, and some of us spoke out against what was happening. We stayed as long as possible that day. We played hopscotch and laughed. Despite the looming threat, we were children being children.

It was a sad day in our house for all of us. But for me, it cut deep. A ban on girls’ schools meant a ban on my dreams, a limit on my future. If I couldn’t get my education, what kind of a future did I have?