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Taliban thugs fear this tiny teen! Fanatics shoot 14-year-old girl in head

HANG ON, KID: Schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai recuperates in Pakistan yesterday (above) after being shot by a Taliban assassin for her education advocacy.

HANG ON, KID: Schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai recuperates in Pakistan yesterday (above) after being shot by a Taliban assassin for her education advocacy. (AFP/Getty Images)

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The bearded Taliban gunman strode up to the school bus filled with adolescent girls heading home in Mingora, the main town in the battle-scarred Swat Valley of Pakistan.

“Which of you is Malala Yousafzai?” he demanded.

One of her schoolmates pointed to the courageous 14-year-old, who has become a national symbol of resistance to Taliban tyranny.

Malala knew since the spring that she had been marked for death — when the terrorist group publicly added her name to its assassination list.

She had since stopped wearing her school uniform. Her father, who ran one of the last remaining girls’ schools in the region, stopped taking the family out after sunset.

But Malala still went to school.

Now, face to face with the gunman, Malala denied who she was.

So he shot both girls — hitting Malala in the head and neck — and walked away, according to police.

The horrific attack yesterday ignited an international outcry, especially after the world learned why Malala had been targeted.

Her crime was campaigning to reopen schools for girls in Swat — which were closed when the Taliban swooped in and took over the region three years ago.

“This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter,” Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan told a reporter by telephone as his group claimed responsibility.

As Malala was rushed to a military hospital in the frontier city of Peshawar, supporters recalled how she first exposed the Taliban’s cruelty and the plight of its young victims while writing, from age 11 on, for a BBC blog, “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl.”

“Some of us would go to school in plain clothes,” she wrote, “just to pretend we are not students, and we hid our books under our shawls. We were afraid the Taliban might throw acid in our faces.”

“My brother often prays, ‘O God, bring peace to Swat and, if not, bring either the US or China here,’ ” she wrote.

Mentioning the United States was another crime in the eyes of the Taliban — a capital crime.

“She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her ideal leader,” Ahsan, the spokesman, said in another call. “She was promoting Western culture . . .”

Malala’s fame was her undoing. She began writing her BBC blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai. When the Taliban was driven out of Swat, her identity was revealed and she won an award for bravery, Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize.

Then last year Malala was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize, which is organized by the Dutch group KidsRights to highlight the work of children around the world.

Her shooting was widely condemned.

“Directing violence at children is barbaric, it’s cowardly, and our hearts go out to her and the others who were wounded, as well as their families,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, said “Malala is like my daughter, and yours too. If that mindset prevails, then no daughter would be safe.”

Malala’s family said even the shooting wouldn’t stop her from speaking out.

“This attack cannot scare us nor the courageous Malala. This cowardly act cannot deter Malala to give up her efforts,” said Azizul Hasan, one of her cousins.

At the Peshawar hospital, Malala was listed in critical but stable condition. The bullet entered her skull but missed the brain — the next three or four days will determine her fate, a doctor said.

It doesn’t matter, the Taliban spokesman said. If she survives, he said, the gunmen will come for her again.