Girls wait for classes to reopen in FR Peshawar

Despite purging area of militants, schools keep female sections closed.

PESHAWAR: Female students at private schools in the Hassan Khel area of Frontier Region Peshawar have been unable to attend classes ever since militants forced the section to close over five years ago.

The classes have not resumed even though the area has been cleared of militants, locals say.

Residents say Hassan Khel, an area with a population of around 18,000 people, does not have a government high school for girls. As a result, parents were forced to send their daughters to two private schools in the area after they complete middle school at a government-run institution.



But growing terrorism and the fear of the Taliban forced one of the private schools to shut down in 2012.

“The other school did not do [shut down] it but in 2014 it received threats and warnings from the militants after which it too closed its girls’ section leaving thousands of girls without an education,” said a local Hassan Khel elder on the condition of anonymity.

“Parents then enroled their daughters into another school in the Shera Khera area, but soon it too received a ‘delegation’ from the Taliban telling the school’s owner that he was promoting western culture and values which were not acceptable, completely closing this chapter.”

He added that one solution to the problem was to upgrade the existing government girls’ school in the area to offer higher secondary classes or at least convert it into a high school. But in the four years since, this did not happen.

“My daughter dropped out of school after 2012 and now she has been left illiterate despite the fact that she has been wearing a burqa from when she was 10-years-old and there was nothing unIslamic in her going to school or in the school itself, but militants closed their section by force,” he added.

“One of the owners [of the private schools] was really determined, so he turned his school into a religious seminary, appointing a Hafiz-e-Quran,” he added.



But soon the militants were purged from the area in a grand military operation called Operation Zarb-e-Azb.

“We were expecting normalcy to return, but it did not happen,” he lamented.

While a majority of the area’s residents fled the area during the height of the militancy, and there are still over a thousand girls living in the area whose education has been interrupted for the past five years.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2017.