News stories by Ashfaq Yusufzai, page 20

The killing of Osama Bin Laden in the garrison city Abbottabad in Pakistan has sent shockwaves among its citizens.The city of 600,000 seemed grief-stricken. Most people avoid media persons, who have arrived here in droves in this most peaceful place in the violence-wracked Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The killing of Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in an operation by the U.S. forces has dealt a serious blow to the beleaguered Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

'Life is next to hell as we pass the entire day and night inside four walls of our houses. Militancy and the local male-dominated culture are the reasons for the women’s problems,' says Jabeena Bibi, 38, a resident of Khyber Agency, one of the seven tribal districts of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan.

The government has launched a programme to modernize religious schools so that students get a basic education in such subjects as math, English and even computers.

Pakistan became the world’s top polio-endemic country in 2010 and is now the biggest source of the polio virus to countries declared polio-free many years ago. Due to the unrestricted movement of children along the long and porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, both countries have begun to put in place a joint strategy to stem the tide of the ailment.

The Taliban once regarded as true jihadists here are rapidly losing popularity in response to their ongoing targeting of mosques, schools and innocent people.

Hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders have fallen to drones since the first attack that killed Taliban leader Nek Muhammad in South Waziristan. Now many local people welcome drones.

'I have now hired a house in the adjacent Dera Ismail Khan district where my three daughters are studying in a school,' says Jamil Shah Wazir of the militancy-riddled South Waziristan. Getting girls to school is a real struggle here.

After testing positive for HIV, which caused him to be deported from the United Arab Emirates, Nazarullah probably found little reason to feel fortunate.

He is only 13 and a refugee in a not-too-hospitable country, but Ahmed Jamal already knows what he wants to do for the next decade or so: follow in the footsteps of his older brother.