“I cam out from the main hall, and I saw lots of other girls scattered everywhere,” Anesa, a 9 year old who was hospitalized briefly Sunday, told the Associated Press. ”Then suddenly, I felt that I was losing my balance and falling.” Anesa is one of dozens of Afghan schoolgirls who have fallen ill in the last few days after reporting strange odors in their classrooms in northern Afghanistan. Reports from three schools with in a 2 mile radius of each other in the Kunduz province have raised alarms that Taliban supporters, who oppose educating girls, are attacking local schools with an airborne poison.
None of the illnesses have been serious, and in the cases where girls have been hospitalized it has only been for a short time. Never the less, President Hamid Karzai’s spokeman, Waheed Omar, made it clear in a statement in Kabul that the government will consider any attempt to keep girls out of school a “terrorist act.”
Girls were not allowed to attend school when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. They’ve been brought back into the classroom since the group was officially ousted from power, but the Taliban and other conservative extremist groups have been know to target schoolgirls in the past.
Last year, dozens of girls were hospitalized in Kapisa province under similar circumstances. The Taliban was blamed then too, but research into similar mass sickenings outside Afghanistan suggests that some of the illnesses might have been the result of group hysteria and fear. That fear is quite justified, it seems. Other attacks on schoolgirls have been far more devastating, including a group of men on motorbikes spraying 15 schoolgirls and their teachers with acid while they walked to school in Kandahar in 2008.
Photo: (AP Photo/Fulad Hamdard)
