WP: Afghan Girls, Back in the Shadows

[Pirate Smile]

Afghan Girls, Back in the Shadows
Home Classes Proliferate as Anti-Government Insurgents Step Up Attacks on Schools

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 23, 2006; Page A10

SHEIKHABAD, Afghanistan -- In a small, sunlit parlor last week, 20 little girls seated on rush mats sketched a flower drawn on the blackboard. In a darker interior room, 15 slightly older girls memorized passages from the Koran, reciting aloud. Upstairs was a class of teenage girls, hidden from public view.

The location of the mud-walled home school is semi-secret. Its students include five girls who once attended another home school nearby that was torched three months ago. The very existence of home-based classes is a direct challenge to anti-government insurgents who have attacked dozens of schools across Afghanistan in the past year, especially those that teach girls.


Girls are taught at a home in a village in Wardak province. Taliban attacks have targeted dozens of schools in the past year, especially those teaching girls. (Photos By Pamela Constable -- The Washington Post)

"We are scared. All the home schools are scared. If I even hear a dog bark, I don't open the gate. I go up on the roof to see who is there," said Mohammed Sulieman, 49, who operates home schools for girls in several villages in the Sheikhabad district of Wardak province.
Children's education was once touted as an exceptional success in this struggling new democracy. Within two years of the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement that banned girls' education and emphasized Islamic studies for boys, officials boasted that 5.1 million children of both sexes were enrolled in public schools. These included hundreds of village tent-schools erected by UNICEF.
Now that positive tide has come to a halt in several provinces where Taliban insurgents are aggressively battling NATO and U.S. troops, and has slowed dramatically in many other parts of the country. President Hamid Karzai told audiences in New York this week that about 200,000 Afghan children had been forced out of school this year by threats and physical attacks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092201404.html

[bluedeminredstate]

1. I'm certain

Laura Bush is working on her speech and will deliver it directly! She told us that little girls were going to school and she DID NOT say in secret. Plus Laura told us about legions of women whipping off their Burkas. This must be a liberal lie.

:sarcasm:

[krispos42]

2. Ah, the girls are now right where the Fundie Christians want them

Well on the road to barefoot and pregneant.

My ex went to a fundamentalist christian school in Connecitcut and, although she was educated in the basics, she was fed a lot of stay-home-and-cook crap, oh, and don't forget to be submissive to your husband. She was actually told that woman cannot do politics because she was required to be submissive to Dear Hubby, and therefore a woman elected to office is really her husband being elected to office.

[rodeodance]

3. This is the really sad part of the Taliban taking over--the children are

affected so greatly.