Gunfire injures Afghan woman activist
KABUL: Trailblazing Afghan women’s rights campaigner Fawzia Koofi, a member of the negotiating team that will hold peace talks with the Taliban, has been wounded in a gun atack near Kabul, officials said on Saturday.
Gunmen opened fire on Koofi, 45, and her sister on Friday when they were returning from a meeting in the province of Parwan near the capital, interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said.
Koofi, a former member of parliament and strong critic of the Taliban, was shot in her right hand, he said, adding that she was in a stable condition.
The Taliban denied they were involved in the atack on Koofi.
The atack drew strong condemnation from Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani -- who described it as a “cowardly atack,” according to his spokesman Sediq Seddiqi.
Abdullah Abdullah, who heads the national reconciliation council, called on Afghan authorities to bring “the perpetrators of the atack to justice.” The chief of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, Shaharzad Akbar, also condemned the “horrific atack.” “Worrying patern of targeted atacks that can negatively impact confidence in peace process,” she wrote on Twiter.
In recent months, there have been gun atacks against human rights activists and prosecutors in Kabul.
Koofi survived a previous assassination attempt in 2010, when gunmen fired at her as she was returning to the capital ater an International
Women’s Day event. She was among the few women in a pan-afghan delegation that held several rounds of unofficial dialogue with the Taliban in 2019.
Thatdialoguecamealongsideseparatenegotiations between the militants and the United States which finally led to the signing of an agreement between the two in February this year.
At the time, Koofi said how she had received threats previously from militants just for wearing nail polish. Koofi is now one of four women negotiators in the Afghan team that will hold direct talks with the Taliban in the coming days.
“I think this time we are going for serious talks,” she said this week. “There is a sense of pride but in the meantime, it’s a lot of stress.
“You have to really make sure that you are perfect in many ways.” Koofi, a widow and mother of two daughters, was the first girl in her family to atend school.