Head teacher Parveen Begum says she has had threatening letters
Hungry to learn across the world
BBC News
15 October 2009
…Parveen says that when the Taliban took control of Swat, she started receiving threatening letters.
“They said if we didn’t close the school they would blow it up with all of us in it,” she says. “We were scared, but we stayed open.”
Then a group of Taliban militants visited Parveen at the school in person.
“They told us we could stay open if we all wore burkas, even the little girls,” she says. “We did that, but they blew the place up anyway.”
More than 300 schools in Swat were damaged in this way.
It was a systematic effort by the Taliban to stop girls getting an education, and one of the main ways they chose to put pressure on the government.
But the Taliban are not in charge here any more and, in spite of immense difficulties, lessons at Kanju Chowk have restarted…
The entire article can be read at BBC News.
