News stories by Ashfaq Yusufzai, page 14

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 28 (IPS) - A makeshift girls' school in Bajaur. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

PESHAWAR,  Jul 28 2012 (IPS) -Taking turns to lug a heavy can of edible oil, Mushtari and Sheema Gul, twin sisters aged nine, trip home happily from their school in Ghareebabad village in Pakistan’s troubled Bajaur Agency.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 28 (IPS) - Far from fears that female education is on the decline after the Taliban campaign against girls’ schools, female students outclassed their male counterparts in the secondary school examination for 2012.

PESHAWAR, Jul 23 (IPS) - Most families of Taliban men killed in fighting against the army in Pakistan or in Afghanistan have been reduced to living in abject poverty.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jul 09 (IPS) - By ordering a ban on polio immunisation, in its strongholds along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the Taliban is holding up an ambitious global programme to rid the world of  the crippling childhood disease, say World Health Organisation (WHO) doctors.

Pakistan’s efforts to contain polio in areas bordering Afghanistan may have received a setback following the conviction of a doctor who allegedly ran a fake vaccine programme to locate Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

Thousands of civilians reaching Peshawar following military action in Khyber Agency say the Taliban have been preventing refugees from leaving. The refugees say local residents are being used as human shields.

The sentencing of the Pakistani doctor believed to have provided the U.S. with vital DNA evidence that led to the tracing and killing of Osama bin Laden has set off new conflicts within Pakistan. The Taliban are now out to get him beyond what the law can.

The deaths of 20 children, in an outbreak of measles in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Agency (FATA), are raising concerns over the state of immunisation in the conflict-ridden areas along the Afghanistan border.