In late 2008, the BBC Urdu service proposed to Yousafzai that one of his students blog anonymously about what it was like going to school under Taliban rule. Malala volunteered to do it herself. She dived into the new project with dark humor. “On my way from school to home I heard a man saying, ‘I will kill you,’” she wrote on Jan. 3, 2009. “I hastened my pace … to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone.”
Even though her diary entries were anonymous, Malala apparently had few qualms about speaking openly to a national audience. On the evening of Feb. 18, 2009, she was attending an anti-Taliban protest with her father in Swat’s capital, Mingora, where she spied broadcaster Hamid Mir, who was in town reporting. She ran up to him and asked to be on his show. Intrigued, he put her on. “All I want is an education,” she told Mir and his audience. “And I am afraid of no one.”
By the time the Taliban were driven from Swat seven months later, Malala had become a visible advocate for girls’ education. She campaigned to raise government spending on schools (at the moment it’s a miserable 2% of GDP, compared with the U.S. average expenditure of about 5.4%) and encouraged families to break with tribal tradition and allow their daughters to attend classes. A number of schools were renamed in her honor. She met with the late Richard Holbrooke, then the U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, to plead for assistance for Pakistani schools.
But in December 2009, Malala, whose identity as the BBC blogger had been something of an open secret for several months, was publicly identified by her father, who was proud of her accomplishments. The leader of the Swat Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah, decided it was time to silence Malala and sent two men to kill her. “We did not want to kill her, as we knew it would cause us a bad name in the media,” Sirajuddin Ahmad, a senior commander and spokesman for the Swat Taliban, told TIME. “But there was no other option.”
When the converted truck that serves as the Khushal school bus came to a stop on Oct. 9 this year, few of the 14 girls and three teachers crammed onto the two long benches inside even noticed. They were too busy chatting about the exams they had just completed. Shazia Ramzan, a 13-year-old sitting next to Malala near the open back of the truck, was the first to see the gunman. “Which one is Malala?” he barked. Terrified, the girls fell silent. “I think we must have looked at her,” admits Shazia. “We didn’t say anything, but we must have looked, because then he shot her.” Shazia screamed when she saw Malala slump forward. The gunman turned and shot Shazia and another girl, neither fatally. The gunman fled.
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