Attacks beset Afghan girls' schools

It was little more than a shed, with no chairs or desks. But for the 50 young girls who had studied there since April, the two-room school in this pastoral pocket of Logar province was all that stood between a lifetime of ignorance and a glimmer of knowledge.

Now the doors have been padlocked, the teacher says he is too scared to return, and the former students are back to their customary chores - pumping water at the village well, weeding onion fields and carrying loads of animal fodder on their heads.

That may be exactly what the unknown assailants had in mind when they broke into the shed late at night 10 days ago, doused the classrooms with fuel and set them afire, leaving behind leaflets in the Dari language warning that girls should not go to school and that teachers should not teach them.

"When I was walking home today, the little girls followed me and asked when they could go back to school. But I am not ready to teach them again because I am afraid for my own safety," confided Fazel Ahmed, 39, the school's only teacher. "I'm very upset. These students will make the future of our community and our country."

Education system

The attack was followed two days later by the midnight burning of three tents used as classrooms outside another school in Logar province. According to officials of Unicef, which is helping to revive the country's long-neglected education system, there have been 18 incidents of school sabotage nationwide in the past 18 months, often accompanied by similar warnings.

The assailants could be from the Taliban, the former government that opposed girls' education as morally corrupting, and whose armed supporters recently have been regrouping. Or they could be from other conservative Islamic groups who once fought the Taliban but are now plotting a political comeback as guardians of religious purity.

Whoever they are, said school officials in Logar and education experts in Kabul, the capital, their goal is clearly to undermine Afghanistan's successful emergence into the modern world after 25 years of military conflict and religious repression that paralysed its development in every sphere - particularly the emancipation of women.

And yet everyone involved in Afghan education - from village elders to foreign charities - insists that such tactics cannot slow the extraordinarily swift and widespread revival of girls' education that has taken place since the Taliban was defeated and replaced by a US-backed government under President Hamid Karzai in December 2001.

"We have 4.2 million children in 7000 schools now, and a 37 per cent increase in the number of girls in school since last year," said Sharad Sapra, the Unicef director for Afghanistan. The increase amounts to 400,000 more girls in school this year. "There is concern that these sporadic incidents should not become a wave, but almost everyone wants their daughters to go to school, and overall, people do not seem to be intimidated."

The second Logar province school to be attacked, a primary school in the village of Mogul Khel where girls and boys study in separate shifts and separate areas, has already achieved national fame because of its immediate resistance to the threat.

Karzai, speaking at a news conference in Kabul on Sunday with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, noted proudly that almost all students and teachers there had returned to class the day after the attack.

On Saturday, classes were in full, noisy swing, if in hastily improvised settings. Groups of boys recited their multiplication tables in unison, sitting on the playground next to the burned tents. Groups of girls huddled on straw mats in the front lobby, reading their Pashto language lessons from a portable blackboard.

"We do not know who these saboteurs are, but our school is the cradle of education in Logar, and we will defend it," said Mahmoud Ayub Saber, 50, the principal, who returned home last year after waiting out the Taliban era in Pakistan.

Determined

Education Ministry officials in Kabul said they are determined to ensure the success of girls' education, but they acknowledged that they have limited resources to physically protect schools, and they noted with alarm that a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism is challenging the modernising policies of the Karzai government.

"Our society is going through many changes, and there are fundamentalists who want to resist this change," said Ashrak Hossaini, deputy minister of education. "We are trying to move to a modern and civilised stage, and girls' schools are attacked because they represent this movement. We must not only provide physical protection, but also prepare the people mentally for these changes."