Meet Komal Ali Shah, first Pakistani selected for anti-nuclear weapon academy

Komal Ali Shah has become the first Pakistani student to be selected for the Hiroshima-ICAN Academy on Nuclear Weapons and Global Security 2021.

The 25-year-old is a Mphil student at the National Defence University in Islamabad. She is among the 41 participants selected from across the globe for the training programme, hence becoming the first Pakistani to make it to the international organisation.

The programme, which was first started in 2019 in Geneva, takes place every year with a key aim to mobilize civil society around the world to support the objective of prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons.

While talking to the media, Komal said that she would focus on encouraging campaigns about nuclear disarmament from an educational perspective, adding that she would conduct a research on environmental hazards around the testing sites of nuclear weapons.

For the programme, half of the participants are selected from nuclear-weapon states like the UK, USA, Germany, Russia, and China, and the remaining are picked from non-recognized nuclear-weapon states such as Pakistan, India, and Israel.