Abused Afghan women opt for suicide [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

Clearly, it is not the Taliban that is solely to blame for the plight of women and girls, it is the tribal culture present in even the few areas controlled by NATO and the illegitimate Karzai regime. Consequently, it is disingenuous at best to use women's rights or keeping the Taliban out on account of women, as arguments in support of continuing the war in Afghanistan.

Abused Afghan women opt for suicide (VIDEO at link)

For many women trapped in abusive marriages in Afghanistan, death can seem like the only way out.

In the northwestern province of Herat, doctors this year have treated at least seventy women who attempted to take their own lives by setting themselves on fire.

More than 40 of them died, in what doctors describe as a lingering and painful process.

Al Jazeera's David Chater reports from Herat where he speaks to one woman who said she saw self-immolation as a means to escape a lifetime of abuse.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/11/2009112992816757297.html

Domestic despair in Afghanistan

By David Chater in Asia on November 28th, 2009

The last time I stood by the bedside of a woman who’d tried to burn herself to death was in Kandahar one year ago. She was screaming in pain and later died. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

But this week I found myself in the Burns Unit at a hospital in Herat watching a mother spoon feed her child some rice through lips that were horribly blistered. Yet another case of self-immolation and another image that will haunt me long after I’ve left Afghanistan.

Letifa was only 11 years old when her father told her she had been betrothed to a man who was more than twenty years her senior. One day she simply poured petrol over her head and struck a match.

The doctors say she has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. The burns went deep.
There’ve been 66 such cases admitted to this specialized clinic so far this year. Forty one of them have died.

There are many other cases where the victims live in outlying villages and never reach the hospital. The official statistics probably give no real indication of the scale of this problem in Afghanistan.

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2009/11/28/domestic-despair-afghanistan