Unknown attackers exploded a government high school in northwestern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province early Friday, local police confirmed. The explosion was in Akbari village, which is under the jurisdiction of the Gul Imam police station in Tank district. Police sources said that the blast destroyed several rooms in the school.
No one has taken responsibility for the attack so far. The security officials, however, note that splinter groups of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who are still active in the Tank district, are known to be anti-girls’ education and have a history of attacking schools.
The schools’ destruction is not a new phenomenon in the region. Local NGOs have said that over 450 schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been destroyed by such attacks in the last decade. These attacks have compelled hundreds of thousands of students to drop out or to study in makeshift classrooms or alongside the ruins of bombed-out school buildings.
Between 2007 and 2019, assaults on girls’ schools were particularly common in the Swat Valley and other parts of the northwest that had been under the control of the Pakistani Taliban of the former tribal districts. The most notorious attack was in 2012, when Malala Yousafzai, an adolescent girl who promoted education, was attacked by militants. Malala survived and went on to become a world icon for girls’ education as well as a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
