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With 180 girls' schools torched since 2008 in Pakistan's Swat Valley and some 900 indefinitely closed, the future for education for some 125,000 young women is under dire threat by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The latest bombings took place Monday in the district capital, Mingora, "once considered the safest place in Swat," according to The Guardian . Five girls' schools were leveled by TTP militants who last week decreed a permanent ban on education for girls. In recent weeks, residents who have crossed the TTP have been strung-up from trees, beaten, or had their shops destroyed while markets have been ruled " no go " areas for women. First mobilized during the 1980s by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) as "plausibly deniable" assets to wage "holy war" against Afghanistan's socialist government, organized crime and drug-linked jihadi groups now threaten Pakistan itself. Call it "blo...

As the fallout from Nov'08's bloody siege in Mumbai focuses the world's attention on Pakistan's ability to control insurgents within its own borders, Al Jazeera investigates Pakistan's role in the so-called 'war on terror'. In this exclusive 4 part series, Rageh Omaar travels from the capital, Islamabad, to the tribal heartlands to chart the spread of suicide bombings and the escalation of violence that has turned Pakistan into a war zone. Pakistan's War: The Battle Within Rageh Omaar revisits the scene of the military assault on the Red Mosque, which he witnessed in July 2007. Rageh and his team had been the last television crew inside the mosque before the siege began and filmed the last interview with mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi before his death. Rageh learns that the showdown for control of the Red Mosque marked a turning-point in Pakistan's war with the insurgents - the moment when the Taliban-backed insurgency moved from the tribal areas o...