Malala on the mend, dad says

Malala Yousafzai waves as she is discharged from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in central England.STORY HIGHLIGHTSMalala Yousafzai is "recovering very well, very fast," her father said FridayZiauddin Yousafzai said his daughter has had an international impactU.N. education envoy: Malala's 16th birthday will be "Malala Day" in Pakistan

(CNN) -- Ziuaddin Yousafzai spent much of his life believing that girls should get an education. He always made sure his daughter Malala understood that.

Months after Taliban militants gravely wounded the 15-year-old with a bullet to the head for being vocal about that belief, he thinks more people around the world and in his home country agree with him.

Last October, the teenager was riding home in a school van in the Swat Valley, a Taliban stronghold in Pakistan, when masked men stopped the vehicle. They demanded that the other girls identify Malala.

The trained their guns on their target and fired. Then they shot another girl, wounding her.

Malala was treated by Pakistani doctors in the initial days after the shooting. The prognosis was dire. As international outrage grew, Pakistanis took to the streets. Shooting a little girl? The Taliban had gone too far this time. The government had better do something. Around the world, more people began learning about how the Taliban, years earlier, had ordered that all girls leave school.

Malala "is the daughter of the whole world," her father told CNN on Friday. "The world owns her."

She has become an icon of education, a symbol of girls' rights. "She has made a difference," said.

View the Original article