So, some guy made stupid movie and mullahs went berserk burning and killing people all across the country. Here a child is shot by rabid terrorist and you won’t hear a beep from mullah parties. In fact, many taliban supporters here are justifying it and saying that America, India or Israel must be responsible for this tragedy.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Doctors have removed a bullet lodged near the spine of Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl gunned down on her school bus by the Taliban, officials said Wednesday. Yousafzai’s chances of survival improved after the surgery, but she remained unconscious and in critical condition.
As schoolchildren throughout the nation held prayer vigils for the teenage education activist, many Pakistani political leaders and international figures expressed revulsion over the assassination attempt in the volatile Swat Valley region.
But religious parties and mosque leaders were largely silent, highlighting the grip that right-wing clerics hold on this increasingly conservative, majority-Muslim country.
“These religious parties have strong ideological links to the Taliban. Conceptually there is not much difference between them. They want to control the state and take up jihad against the West,” said Ijaz Khattak, a professor at the University of Peshawar who knows Yousafzai and her father, and a member of Swat’s peace jirga, or tribal council.
The Pakistani Taliban said it dispatched a gunman to kill Yousafzai, a ninth grader, because the militant group considered her a pro-Western symbol of “infidels and obscenity.” If she survives, a spokesman for the group said Tuesday, it will try to kill her again.
But mainstream Pakistanis view Yousafzai, whose advocacy of girls’ education won global recognition, as a symbol of hope in a country long beset by violence and despair.
Pakistan’s top military official, Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, visited Yousafzai Wednesday morning at the military hospital in Peshawar where she is being treated for gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Kayani, arguably Pakistan’s most powerful man, called the shooting a “heinous act of terrorism.”
“The cowards who attacked Malala and her fellow students have shown time and again how little regard they have for human life and how low they can fall in their cruel ambition to impose their twisted ideology,” Kayani said, according to a news release issued by the military’s information office. “. . . They have no respect even for the golden words of the prophet . . . that ‘the one who is not kind to children, is not amongst us.’ ”
Pakistan’s army has lost thousands of soldiers and officers in its war against the Taliban, which has stepped up its attacks in the western tribal areas and now frequently beheads captured troops. In his statement, Kayani sought to draw a sharp line between Islam and the Taliban, saying that “Islam guarantees each individual — male or female — equal and inalienable rights to life, property and human dignity.”
“We refuse to bow before terror,” Kayani said. “We will fight regardless of the cost. We will prevail, insha Allah” [God willing].
Yousafzai was 11 when she gained notice in early 2009 for writing a diary under a pen name for the BBC’s Urdu service about Taliban atrocities. She lives in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley, where Taliban insurgents imposed harsh Islamic law for two years before being routed by a major military operation in May 2009.
Today, the army promotes Swat as a tourist destination — it sponsored a festival there in July, trying to restore the region’s reputation as the Switzerland of Pakistan. Tuesday’s daylight attack demonstrated the Taliban’s continued ability to infiltrate the area, which adjoins Pakistan’s insurgency-plagued tribal belt. Two months ago, Taliban gunmen shot and seriously injured the president of Swat’s hotel association in Mingora and vowed further attacks on those it considers pro-government.
Yousafzai and her father, Zia Uddin Yousafzai, who runs the girls’ school his daughter attended, were vocal in their anti-Taliban views.
In 2011, the Pakistani government awarded the teenager a national peace prize and 1 million rupees ($10,500). She also was a finalist last year for the International Children’s Peace Prize, awarded by a Dutch organization that lauded her bravery in standing up for girls’ education rights amid rising fundamentalism when few others in Pakistan would do so.
Pakistan has banned some pro-Taliban extremist groups and parties. But the militants nonetheless stage rallies to rail against Pakistan’s U.S.-allied government, which is dominated by the liberal People’s National Party. Many right-wing clerics support the Afghan Taliban, which, like the Pakistani Taliban, supports the imposition of sharia law.
“The religious right considers the main political parties to be too soft, and collaborating with the state,” said Khattak. “If the Taliban is successful in disrupting the state . . . these political parties can take hold of the state.”
The only statement from a religious group condemning the attack came from the Majlis-e Wahdat-e Muslimeen, a Shiite party that holds seats in Parliament.
“Firing upon innocent students and injuring them was blatant terrorism, and the perpetrators behind this vile act should be swiftly brought to justice,” Allama Raja Nasir Abbas, secretary general of the party, said Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s prime minister and U.S. officials were quick to condemn the attack. “We have to fight the mind-set that is involved in this. We have to condemn it,” Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf told the Pakistani Senate. “Malala is like my daughter and yours, too. If that mind-set prevails, then whose daughter would be safe?”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland called the shooting “barbaric” and “cowardly.”
School was over for the day, and the bus was a few hundred yards from school grounds when the attack occurred, said Kamran Khan, a local administrator.
“A masked man stopped the school van, while another jumped in the rear asking for Malala,” Khan said. The driver tried to speed off, but the gunman succeeding in shooting the teenager, jumping off and escaping. A seventh-grader who was on the bus with Yousafzai was shot in the leg.
Ihsanullah Ihsan, chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said in calls to the news media that the militant group targeted Yousafzai because she generated “negative propaganda” about Muslims.
“She considers President Obama as her ideal leader. Malala is the symbol of the infidels and obscenity,” Ihsan said.
The Pakistani Taliban has bombed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the tribal regions and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Yousafzai lived.
After being forced out of Swat in 2009, Pakistani Taliban fighters relocated to the Afghan border region near the eastern Afghan provinces of Konar and Nurestan. They are blamed for attacks on Pakistani forces from across the border.
In her diary, Yousafzai wrote about her fears and the growing Taliban influence. One morning, she wore her favorite pink dress. “During the morning assembly we were told not to wear colorful clothes as the Taliban would object to it,” she wrote.
In another entry, she wrote: “On my way from school to home I heard a man saying, ‘I will kill you.’ I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else.”
Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.