Kakar always called her on a special line that would be difficult to trace. “I would start off with her in Pashto. ‘Are you ready? Let’s start.’ ” Then they would switch to Urdu. Later, there would be accusations that Kakar had coached her. “They ran unedited,” he told me.
On January 3, Malala posted, “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 [to see] if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile.” There would be thirty-five entries in all, the last on March 4. Malala was cautious, but in one entry, she criticized the army: “It seems that it is only when dozens of schools have been destroyed and hundreds [of] others closed down that the army thinks about protecting them. Had they conducted their operations here properly, this situation would not have arisen.” In one entry she almost tipped her hand: “My mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and said to my father ‘why not change her name to Gul Makai?’ I also like the name, because my real name means ‘grief stricken.’ My father said that some days ago someone brought the printout of this diary, saying how wonderful it was. My father said that he smiled but could not even say it was written by his daughter.”
THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL
Ashraf drove to Mingora in the middle of the night with his cameraman. He had twenty-four hours to get into and out of the city. “To be seen with a camera was an invitation to be killed,” he told me. Coming over the mountains in the darkness, Ashraf heard the muezzins’ call to prayer. “I had a sense of disaster,” he said. Just before dawn, as he approached the city, Ashraf called Yousafzai. “It is too early,” Ziauddin said. “I was not expecting you.” He told Ashraf that Malala’s uncle was staying with them, and he was strongly opposed to having journalists present on this last day of school. There was no mention of Malala’s blog. Ashraf was completely unaware of the calls she had made with Kakar. “I told no one,” Kakar later said.
It was clear to Ashraf, however, that something had happened to frighten Yousafzai. “He was clearly upset. He did not want me there.” From a friend’s house, just before dawn, Ashraf called Ellick. “Adam said, ‘Shoot everything from the moment Malala gets up and has her breakfast to every moment of her last day at school.’ Nothing was to be left out.” Ashraf told him, “Ziauddin is reluctant.” Ellick said, “But he has promised us.” Ashraf was suddenly caught in a dilemma: upset his close friend or fail. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I decided I must try to convince him directly.”
Terrified that he might be stopped by soldiers, he hurried to Yousafzai’s house. “What are you doing here?” Yousafzai said, clearly angry that Ashraf was putting his family in danger. “It was criminal on my part,” Ashraf said later. “I talked to him about the danger we were in, and that this was the moment he could alert the world. I explained that we needed to stay with Malala all day, shooting her, and Ziauddin said, ‘What!’ ” It was clear he had never understood that Malala would be the star of the video. “I was in a panic,” Ashraf told me. “He said, ‘I thought it would be only about all the other schools.’ I said, ‘No, to make this important, we need to follow Malala and you the entire day.’ ”
Ashraf now believes that the code of Pashtunwali made it impossible for Yousafzai to refuse. A worried father, he was also driven by nanawatai, the obligation to give shelter. When Malala woke up, Ashraf and the cameraman were in her bedroom, setting up for a shot. Outside the window was the sound of shelling. “Malala did not understand what we were doing there,” Ashraf said. “She was shy. I had to say to her, ‘Malala, imagine this is your last day of school.’ It was her last day, but we had to work with her. Trying to brush her teeth, she kept looking at us. I said, ‘Be natural. Don’t look at the camera. Pretend we are not here.’ It took her hours to understand. We helped to mold her into a part—a part she very much believed.”
Ashraf’s voice broke as he described to me the rush of adrenaline that came over him as they struggled to get every shot. Half the classes at the school were empty, and there were nearby explosions all day. For hours, the camera stayed on Malala and her father, who sat in his office calling parents who had pulled their children out. “Pay us some of your dues,” he said.
“Ziauddin was adamant. He did not want us taking pictures of the girls at school. Soon he said, ‘Enough. You must leave.’ ” But after Ziauddin left the school, Ashraf continued to film in the courtyard, where one scene would jump out at viewers. Wearing headscarves, eight girls line up, and one with a veiled face reads her essay directly into the camera, demanding, “Why the peace and innocent people of the valley are targeted?” Ashraf recalled with emotion, “I arranged that. I grouped them in the courtyard and said, ‘Girls, tell me how you feel about your school.’ ” What guided him, he said, was his trust in Islam: “Children are never attacked. They are sacred.”
* * *
Watching “Class Dismissed,” the thirteen-minute video, a viewer is struck by the raw power of Malala, timidly determined to express her deeply held beliefs, which would be very simple if she lived in the middle-class world of Lahore, or Karachi, or New York. At one point she declares, “I want to become a doctor. It’s my own dream. But my father told me that ‘you have to become a politician.’ But I don’t like politics.” Ashraf would later have to deal with a question that plagues all journalists: What are the consequences of exposure? He would also have to ask himself a corollary question: What would have been the implications of deciding not to expose the horrors of Mingora? Ashraf still blames himself for teasing her strong beliefs out of a child who would be seen as an exemplary agent for change in one world and as a danger that had to be stopped in another.
All through February, Malala continued to blog. She reported on the peace negotiations as the army capitulated and signed off on turning Swat over to strict Islamic law. Britain and some other countries immediately protested; the United States did not. The Taliban seemed to be appeased, but they continued to kidnap government officials and assassinate reporters.
“In a valley where people do not even hear the voice of a girl, a girl comes forward and speaks a language that the local people cannot even think of. She writes diaries for the BBC, she speaks up in front of diplomats, on television, and her class follows,” said Jehangir Khattak, the former news editor of Peshawar’s Frontier Post. “Ziauddin allowed his daughter to rise in a society where she was seeing dead bodies every day. She didn’t hear about the threat—she lived it. In a closed society, she did not mince words.”
GOING PUBLIC
“You are right now in a car going into a city where you are a wanted man,” Ellick says off-camera in a second New York Times web video, “A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey,” which is twenty minutes long. Six months had passed since the Taliban moved into Swat. The Yousafzais had fled, along with 1.5 million other refugees from the area. As many as one million moved into camps, where often the only relief organizations providing food were religious Islamic groups with ties to the Taliban, who delivered it with invective about foreign enemies. “There was no sign of the army or the police,” Ziauddin told Ellick. Malala and her mother went to stay with relatives. Ziauddin, in Peshawar, moved in with three close friends from the Jirga. For months Mingora was under siege. And still the army could not—or would not—put the resources into annihilating the Taliban. That spring of 2009, Mingora became a ghost town as the Taliban advanced on nearby Buner, only one hundred miles from the capital. Finally the army sent more troops, backed by helicopters and rockets, to the area.
In the video, Malala and her father return to the school and find total devastation. Discovering a message left in a student’s composition book, Malala says, “They have written something.” Then she reads, “I am proud to be a Pakistani and a soldier of the Pakistani army.” Looking angrily at the camera, she says, “He doesn’t know the spelling of ‘soldier.’ ” They find a letter intended for Ziauddin: “We have lost so much dear and precio
us lives of our soldiers. And this is all due to your negligence.” Looking at a hole blasted in one wall, Malala says, “The Taliban destroyed us.”
Later in the video, Malala and her father meet the late Richard Holbrooke, America’s special envoy, in Pakistan to inspect the refugee camps. Holbrooke seems surprised by the tone the girl takes with him. “If you can help us in our education, please help us,” Malala tells him. “Your country faces a lot of problems,” Holbrooke replies. Later, Urdu bloggers would use this footage against her as proof that she was “a Zionist agent” and “a CIA spy.”
“I was sick when I saw the video for the first time,” Ashraf told me. “In New York, the editors had added footage of Taliban floggings.” Now convinced that Malala was a possible target, he emailed Ellick that he was alarmed. “I was thinking we were making a commodity out of this small and graceful shining little girl. This conflict should not have been fought by Malala—it should have been fought by my army, my military, my police. This should not have been Malala’s job. That was a camouflage! This was an excuse for us to focus on Malala—not on the forces behind Malala, who were doing little to help the people of Mingora.”
Fazlullah had fled to Afghanistan, but his troops remained in the hills. Interviewing in the refugee camps, Pir Shah and New York Times bureau chief Jane Perlez heard reports that the army was kidnapping and killing anyone thought to be an extremist. Footage of suspected army assassinations came to them and ran in the Times. Soon Perlez’s visa was not renewed, and Shah, threatened by the ISI, left Pakistan.
* * *
Malala now spoke much more openly. In August, she appeared on Geo TV star anchor Hamid Mir’s news show. She talked about the two years her city had been under constant shelling. “What would you like to be?” Mir asked her. “I would like to be a politician. Our country is full of crisis. Our politicians are lazy. I would like to remove the prevalent laziness and serve the nation.”
As Pakistan imploded, Ellick filed story after story from Karachi and Islamabad. “At dinners and over tea, I would tell my urban middle-upper-class friends about what I had witnessed in Swat—and about Malala,” he posted on Facebook. “I could not get anyone to care. They looked at me like I had a contagious disease—as if I was describing an atrocity in a village in Surinam.” In 2010, one year after making his film, he returned there during a period of devastating floods. “I found hundreds and hundreds of kids that were furious at the fact that their schools had not been rebuilt and they openly said to me, ‘You know our government is corrupt.’ ”
It had become an open secret that Malala was the blogger known as Gul Makai. “I am going to apply Malala for the International Children’s Peace Prize,” Ziauddin told Kakar, referring to the annual awards of the KidsRights Foundation, in Amsterdam. Later, Kakar told him, “Do not chase after fame. Malala is already known and could go abroad to study.” He explained, “I was worried they [reporters] would ask Malala a question: ‘What would you do if the Taliban comes?’ She would not know what to say. This question is not about education. Instead she would tell them, ‘Listen to me, the Taliban is very bad.’ ”
* * *
As Malala increased her TV appearances, Pakistan’s relationship with the United States deteriorated severely. In 2011, CIA agent Raymond Davis was arrested and later released in Lahore, Osama bin Laden was assassinated, Pakistan cut NATO supply lines after an accidental bombing killed soldiers on the border, and drone strikes resulted in a large number of civilian casualties.
When Malala appeared on the talk show A Morning with Farah, she was dressed modestly in a pastel tunic and headscarf. Farah Hussain, glamorous in a black shalwar kameez and high heels, could hardly disguise her condescension. “Your Urdu is so perfect,” she told Malala, and then brought up the Taliban. Malala said, “If a Talib is coming, I will pull off my sandal and slap him on his face.” For a country girl of fourteen, she was approaching a dangerous line.
Ziauddin and Malala often received threats, and rocks were thrown over the walls of the school and their house. The government offered protection, but Ziauddin turned it down, saying, “We cannot have normalcy in our classes if there are guns.” Malala used the consolation-prize money she had received from her own government to buy a school bus. In June the threats continued: “Malala is an obscenity.” “You are befriending the kaffir [infidels].”
In May, the local newspaper, Zama Swat, reported the killings of numerous prisoners under mysterious circumstances while they were in police custody. For months, the menace from the army had gone unreported—the looting of forests by army patrols, assassinations without trials, local people roughed up at checkpoints.
With the end of the school year, the Sufi dance festival resumed and field flowers covered the hills. Each year Yousafzai arranged a school picnic at the waterfall in Marghazar, thirty minutes away. Days later someone dropped a note over the wall: “You are giving our girls loose morals and spreading vulgarity by taking the girls to the picnic spot where they run around without purdah.”
In June the owner of the Swat Continental Hotel, in Mingora, an outspoken critic of the army’s failure to root out the extremists, was gunned down in the street. Then Zahid Khan, the head of the hotel association, was attacked on the way home from his mosque. “I wanted an inquiry,” he told me. “Why were these Taliban not attacking anyone in the army? No one was arrested.” The Jirga reacted by announcing that its members would not take part in the Independence Day celebration on August 14, when the military would demonstrate its presence in Swat. Immediately they were summoned to the base to have tea with the brigadier, which one member saw as a chilling threat. They decided not to accept the invitation, but Yousafzai persuaded them to negotiate. He later told a friend, “The meeting was a success. I cannot take on the Pakistani army.”
“Ziauddin, you are on a list to be killed,” Aqeel Yousafzai told him in September. “You must stop allowing Malala to speak out in public. Or leave the country.” Close friends had already advised Ziauddin to leave and get a scholarship somewhere for Malala. “I came early in the morning,” Aqeel told me. “Malala was asleep. Ziauddin awakened her, and she came and joined us. ‘Your uncle Aqeel thinks we are in a lot of danger,’ he said. ‘He thinks you should leave.’ Malala looked at me and said, ‘My uncle is a very good man, but what he is suggesting does not fit with the code of bravery.’ ”
“They want to silence every critic,” said former presidential media adviser Faranahz Ispahani, the wife of former ambassador Husain Haqqani, who was once the target of a trumped-up smear. “So how do they do it? They silence dissident voices, whether it is Benazir Bhutto, [Punjab governor] Salman Taseer, or Malala. With my husband, they called him a traitor. Ziauddin would not shut up, so they put a bullet into his daughter. They did not expect that all of us Pakistanis have reached a point where pluralistic progressive Pakistan is standing up and saying, ‘No more.’ ”
THE ATTACK
On October 9 last year, Ziauddin was at the press club, speaking out against the local government, which was trying to impose control over private schools. “Hold my phone,” he told his friend Ahmed Shah. Shah saw the number of the Khushal school on an incoming call, and Ziauddin indicated for him to answer it. The caller said, “Someone has attacked the bus. Come quickly.” Shah told me, “We rushed to the clinic. Yousafzai said, ‘It could be that someone has come after Malala.’ The first sight of her there was blood coming out of her mouth. She was weeping. Then she passed out.”
One officer described the shooter as a teenager with shaking hands, but the story changed constantly. A few moments after the bus left the school, the girls started singing. Someone in the road who looked friendly waved for the bus to stop, then asked, “Which one of you is Malala?” No one saw a gun in his hand. They looked toward their friend. Then the assassin put a bullet in Malala’s head, and perhaps his unsteadiness saved her life. The bullet only grazed her skull, but it damaged the soft tissue underneath, which controls
the face and neck. Two other girls were also badly injured.
“Look at this map,” Aqeel Yousafzai told me in New York as he drew a diagram. “The checkpoint was a four-minute walk away. The driver screamed for help. No one came. Twenty minutes passed. No one came. Finally they had to rush from the school with the police. Why? Many people believe the military is responsible. The feeling is Malala and her father had to be silenced.”
The Tehrik-I-Taleban Party, Fazlullah’s umbrella group, took credit for the attack. By defying Pashtun tradition, Malala was “a clear sinner” who had violated Shari’a and “a spy who divulged secrets of the mujahideen and Taliban through BBC and in return received awards and rewards from the Zionists.” They accused her of wearing makeup in interviews. In a seven-page statement, they announced that Ziauddin would be next. Reports in the press mentioned Yousafzai’s desire for asylum.
Within hours of Malala’s attack, Ashraf received a phone call from Ellick: “Are we responsible?” Later, Ashraf recalled, Ellick consoled him, saying, “We did nothing wrong. If you feel you must write about it, you should. It could be a catharsis.” Ellick also emailed Ziauddin expressing his own sense of guilt, Yousafzai said. On WGBH, Boston’s public-television station, discussing the ethics of putting a child on-camera, Ellick said, “I’m part of a system that continuously gave them awards . . . which emboldened her . . . and made her more public, more brash, more outspoken.”
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