Islamabad, Oct 10: A day after a teenage rights activist was shot in the head by Taliban militants, Pakistan Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani today condemned the attack on the girl as a “heinous act of terrorism” and warned that it had exposed the “extremist mindset” confronting the country.
Kayani visited a military hospital in Peshawar to meet 14-year-old schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai, who was shot and seriously injured by the militants during an attack yesterday in the former Taliban stronghold of Swat, located 160 km from Islamabad.
The powerful army chief used the occasion to send out a message to the militants, saying incidents like the attack on Malala “clearly expose the extremist mindset the nation is facing.”
Kayani said the terrorists had underestimated the “resolve and resilience” of the people.
“It is time we further unite and stand up to fight the propagators of such barbaric mindset and their sympathisers,” he said.
“We wish to bring home a simple message: we refuse to bow before terror. We will fight, regardless of the cost, we will prevail Insha Allah,” Kayani was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the military.
However, the Army Chief did not directly refer in his remarks to the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which has claimed responsibility for the attack on Malala. Condemning the attack as a “heinous act of terrorism,” Kayani said the “cowards who attacked Malala and her fellow students have shown time and again how little regard they have for human life and how low they can fall in their cruel ambition to impose their twisted ideology.”
Malala, Kayani said, had “become a symbol for the values that the army, with the nation behind it, is fighting to preserve for our future generations. These are the intrinsic values of an Islamic society, based on the principles of liberty, justice and equality of man.”
Kayani noted that this was not the first time the militants had targeted children and referred to a ‘fidayeen' attack on a mosque in the garrison city of Rawalpindi as “a painful reminder of their bloodlust.”
A major general and the children of several senior army officers were among 40 people killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the mosque at Parade Lane in Rawalpindi in December 2009.
Though the Taliban often project themselves as champions of Islam and ‘Shariah', Kayani said the militants had “no respect even for the golden words of the Prophet that ‘the one who is not kind to children, is not amongst us'.”
He added: “Islam guarantees each individual - male or female - equal and inalienable rights to life, property and human dignity, with faith and education as the chief obligations to achieve enlightenment.”
Kayani further said: “In attacking Malala, the terrorists have failed to grasp that she is not only an individual but an icon of courage and hope, who vindicates the great sacrifices that the people of Swat and the nation gave for wresting the valley from the scourge of terrorism.”
The Army Chief was referring to the operation conducted in 2009 to flush out Taliban militants who had overrun Swat Valley and begun extending their influence to several districts located just 100 km from Islamabad.
Hundreds of Taliban militants were killed or captured during the offensive but many of the top commanders, including Maulana Fazlullah, managed to escape to Afghanistan.
