As War Enters Classrooms, Fear Grips Afghans
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?These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.
The staccato of machine-gun fire pelted through the stillness. A 13-year-old named Shukria was hit in the arm and the back, and then teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl?s precious breath and trying to help her stand.
But Shukria was too heavy to lift, and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, sped closer.
As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, killing Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart. Then the attackers seemed to succumb to the frenzy they had begun, forsaking the motorbike and fleeing on foot in a panic, two bobbing heads ? one tucked into a helmet, the other swaddled by a handkerchief ? vanishing amid the earthen color of the wheat.
Six students were shot here on the afternoon of June 12, two of them fatally. The Qalai Sayedan School ? considered among the very best in the central Afghan province of Logar ? reopened only last weekend, but even with Kalashnikov-toting guards at the gate, only a quarter of the 1,600 students have dared to return.
Shootings, beheadings, burnings and bombings: these are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of Afghanistan?s public schools. To take aim at education is to make war on the government.
Parents are left with peculiar choices. ?It is better for my children to be alive even if it means they must be illiterate,? said Sayed Rasul, a father who had decided to keep his two daughters at home for a day.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/world/asia/10afghan.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
