A prominent Pakistani activist, whose campaigns to empower girls have won her international awards and recognition, has defied a travel ban and fled to the US.

Gulalai Ismail said she feared for her life after speaking out against sexual violence and disappearances allegedly carried out by the army in north-western Pakistan.

After four months on the run, she succeeded in eluding a vast hunt and has turned up in the US, where she is seeking asylum.

Ismail said she never sought to become an overseas dissident but believes there has been a closing of the political space in Pakistan, where the army has remained the dominant power-broker for most of the country’s history.

“I never wanted to leave Pakistan,” she said in Washington. “I believe that I can better work towards democracy and civil supremacy and peace in Pakistan.”

But she concluded she would be more effective abroad. “If I had ended up in prison and tortured for many years, my voice would have been silenced.”

Ismail said she posed a special threat as a vocal woman. “When a man stands up, he is mostly against the state oppression,” she said. “But when a woman stands up, she is fighting oppression on many levels – fighting cultural norms, fighting the patriarchy and the state oppression.”

Ismail was a teenager when she co-founded Aware Girls in 2002, which promotes gender equality in the deeply conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa district.

In 2017, she won the prestigious Anna Politkovskaya award for human rights advocacy. A year earlier, she was honoured for conflict prevention by the Chirac Foundation in France and has been welcomed by Michelle Obama.

But Ismail came under greater scrutiny last year when she spoke in support of the Pashtun Protection Movement, which defends the rights of the Pashtun tribe in the north-west.

Quoting witnesses, Ismail said the army crackdown on Pashtun militants near the border with Afghanistan had led to frequent disappearances and sexual assaults.

Most women were silent on such issues due to stigma, she said, but when a boy told her security forces were barging into his home and harassing his mother, she went to investigate.

Ismail said: “Dozens of women had come to tell us that the incident of sexual harassment was not unique. It is systematic. It had been happening for years.”

She was detained briefly in 2018, but her fears mounted in February when she was taken into custody for two days after attempting to hold a news conference.

Ismail said she was held in a cold, dirty room with a urine-soaked sheet on the ground. She said she was denied food and water, and other female inmates warned against talking to the “high-profile terrorist”.

In May, police filed a complaint against Ismail under an anti-terrorism law after she spoke out about the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl.

Ismail declined to discuss how she escaped Pakistan, saying she did not want to put others at risk. Her name was widely circulated to seek her arrest and airport authorities were told not to let her leave.

“There were videos created online by military trolls which were clearly saying that the moment I’m in custody they will teach me a lesson,” she said. “I spoke about the issue of rape – now they will ‘teach me’ what rape is.”

She said security forces attacked her driver and a friend who was handcuffed, beaten and administered electric shocks for 14 hours in an attempt to extract information on her whereabouts.

For now, Ismail is living with her sister in New York. She said her initial fears of being sent back to Pakistan, a historical ally of the US, were eased after she held meetings in Washington at the state department and with staff of US lawmakers.

But she remains worried about her parents in Pakistan. Ismail said they had become isolated with security forces interrogating anyone who dares to even text them.

“I wanted to speak freely and that’s why I’m here,” Ismail said. “However, when it comes to the future of Pakistan, I do not see a prosperous Pakistan until the military establishment decides it needs to go back to its barracks.”