Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by Taliban in her head in 2021, underwent a surgery on August 9. Posting a photo from nine years ago, she wrote, “Two weeks ago I lay in a hospital bed in Boston undergoing my sixth surgery, as doctors continued to repair the Taliban’s damage to my body. Nine years after being shot, I am still recovering from just one bullet. But the people of Afghanistan have taken millions of bullets over the last four decades. My heart breaks for those whose names we will forget or never even know, whose cries for help will go unanswered.”
Malala said that she still has a part of skull that she lost to Taliban bullets nine years ago.
She said she watches in horror as the terrorist group seized power in Afghanistan. According to her blogpost on Podium, the 24-year-old once again emphasised on the need to draw global attention to the plight of civilians in the country.
Her campaign for the education of girls made her Taliban’s enemy and they shot her. Recalling the day, she wrote that a member of the Pakistani Taliban boarded her school bus and shot one bullet into her left temple. The bullet grazed her left eye, skull and brain – lacerating facial nerve, shattering her eardrum and breaking her jaw joints.
She has no memories of the day but still carries both physical and emotional scars of the incident.
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A few days ago, Malala called her best friend, who had been sitting next to her on the bus the day she was shot. With no memories of the day herself, the Nobel Peace Prize winner wanted to know what had happened nine years ago on that day.
Her friend said that she stood still and silent, staring into the face of the Talib as he called out Malala’s name. “You held my hand so tightly that I felt the pain for days,” her friend told her.
Her best friend, who still has nightmares about that day, said that Malala covered her face with her hands and tried to bend down before she collapsed in her lap.
In her post, Malala also talked about the long process of recovery, as the US troops withdrew from Afghanistan. She said she was undergoing her sixth surgery “to repair the Taliban’s damage to my body”.
