PESHAWAR: An under-construction government primary school for girls in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was damaged in an IED blast by unknown militants, police said on Friday. No casualties were reported as the building was unoccupied at the time of the explosion. Militants had planted an explosive material inside the premises of the Azaan Javed Primary School in Baka Khel police jurisdiction of Bannu district. The device was detonated with a powerful blast, causing substantial structural damage to the building. An FIR has been registered and forensic teams have been deployed to collect evidence from the blast site, police said. Authorities have condemned the attack as an attempt to derail educational development in the region. According to a report by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, more than 1,100 girls’ schools have been destroyed in the tribal areas between 2007 to 2017, with teachers and young students also targeted. Before an all-out military operation launched by Pakistan’s security forces in 2014, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) carried out hundreds of attacks on girls’ schools in the tribal areas and settled districts of the northwestern province from its stronghold in Swat district. After the crackdown, TTP militants fled to Afghanistan and began to orchestrate cross border attacks from their new sanctuaries. The Taliban takeover of Kabul has emboldened the TTP, which is fighting to regain control of its strongholds in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Since the takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and banned women from universities. Pakistani Taliban, who are ideologically closer to Afghan Taliban, are trying to enforce a similar anti-education and theocratic agenda in Pakistan’s tribal areas by force. The youngest Nobel Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai, who is from Swat district, was shot in the face when she was 14 by TTP gunmen in 2012 as she wanted to pursue her education.
