Taliban militants have burnt down more than 200 schools in Pakistan's restive Swat valley in the last two years and made all out efforts to prevent girls from receiving education, a media report here said on Sunday. The militants told the residents in the valley that if they were good Muslims they would stop sending their daughters to schools, 'The Sunday Times' said in a report from Mingora, the capital of Swat.

"Every evening (Taliban commander) Maulana Fazullah, nicknamed 'Radio Mullah', broadcast the names on the radio of girls who had stopped going to school - it would be, 'Congratulations to Miss Kulsoon or Miss Shahnaz, who has quit school.' Then he warned others if they continued with their education they would go to hell," the paper said. The Taliban have torched over 200 of Swat's 1,500 schools in the last two years, it said.

The military offensive against the militants resulted in what Martin Mogwania, the acting UN humanitarian coordinator, called "the most dramatic displacement in the world." According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, more than 1.7 million people have been rendered homeless in just three weeks. On Friday, the UN appealed for 340 million pounds, while officials urgently tried to find new sites for camps. The newspaper also gave a graphic account of the havoc created by Taliban in Swat. A 22-year-old medical student from the valley had secretly catalogued the horrors of life in Swat under the Taliban.

The burning-down of schools, bodies hanging upside down, public lashings and decapitated heads with dollars stuffed in their nostrils and notes reading, 'This is what happens to spies,' were all captured on the student's mobile phone at great personal risk, the report said. The paper noted that Fazullah in December announced a deadline of January 15 for all girls to stop attending school. The medical student's account was corroborated by Ziauddin Yusufzai, who ran two schools in Swat and was spokesman for the private school association until he fled the bombing three weeks ago.

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