Killing the hopes of a nation
Droves of educated women, fearing the Taliban’s return, are leaving the country. Thousands of Kabul’s liberal elite have fled abroad.
As the assassins wrenched open the car doors, the Supreme Court judge in the back seat pulled her handbag to her chest. It was not enough to save her.
Bullet after bullet lanced through the bag, hitting Kadria Yasini at least five times. Her fellow judge Zakia Herawi was shot in her face, neck and chest.
The killers sped away on a motorcycle, brandishing their pistols aloft and punching the air, shouting ‘‘Allahu akbar’’, and leaving two of Afghanistan’s most eminent women sprawled in blood in a central Kabul street.
Yasini’s belongings, including the handbag with which she tried to protect herself, were left riddled with bullet holes. Among the items she had been carrying was a Mother’s Day letter from her sons.
The murders caused outrage, and have fed a sense of dread in the Afghan capital, where the educated elite is being slain in an assassination campaign only 13 weeks before the last 2500 American troops are due leave, Britain’s 1000-strong contingent with them.
The judges were murdered as they travelled to work last week. MPs, journalists, civil society leaders, human rights activists and prominent cultural figures have been killed in their dozens over the past three months by pistol-toting motorbike assassins, or have died in fireballs caused by magnetic mines placed under their vehicles.
The Taliban may be seated at peace talks in Qatar, but in Kabul their hit squads are killing and terrorising those most likely to speak out against any return of an Islamic emirate.
After 20 years of Western involvement, and with the last tranche of Western troops due to leave, the violence inflicted on the women judges seems both a grim augur and a dark reversion to the horrors of a previous era.
Yasini’s brother, Haji Mustafa Herawi, rushing from his house at the sound of gunfire, found his sister slumped dead just metres from where their father had been killed by a rocket three decades before.
‘‘As a young man, I ran into this street and collected my dead father’s brain from the tarmac,’’ he said. ‘‘Thirty years later, I ran out and found my sister dead in the car in the same place. And the wounds of the past came back again.’’
Small wonder that droves of educated women, fearing the Taliban’s return, are leaving the country. Men, too.
Applications for Afghan passports are at record levels. Thousands of Kabul’s liberal elite
have fled abroad.
‘‘The effect of all these killings is to silence greater civil society and public debate,’’ said Shaharzad Akbar, chairwoman of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission.
‘‘People are leaving. Those that remain are becoming too afraid to speak out. Public debate on the peace process is being silenced. And seeing two women who would have had to have overcome massive obstacles to get to those positions in a male-dominated judiciary be killed like that raises the question in women’s minds here: is it worth it?’’
The tempo of the Kabul killings accelerated last November. In the 102 days up to last Sunday, 91 civilians and 64 police
and security personnel were killed in and around Kabul, with 342 wounded.
Intelligence sources say the Taliban, limited in their scope for large-scale urban bomb attacks by the terms of the accord they made with the United States last year, have instead trained teams of assassins to terrorise progressive civil society as a means of paving the way for their return.
The murder of the judges hit a particular nerve. Afghan VicePresident Amrullah Saleh asked for Taliban prisoners found guilty of involvement in the terror campaign to be hanged.
‘‘The aim of these targeted attacks is simple, yet strategic: to humiliate the government, and to target the strata of society – civil society, the media, and women – that the Taliban see as an obstacle to their return,’’ said Saleh.
Afghan social media was flooded by posts supporting Saleh’s call for those convicted of involvement in the judges’ murders to be hanged. The Taliban responded with threats.
All American forces are due to leave Afghanistan by May 1, regardless of whether the Afghan government and the Taliban have signed a peace accord. The level of fighting in rural areas is twice what is normal for winter, and few observers expect a peace deal to be signed before the withdrawal date.
Yet all agree that if the talks collapse, the country could once again slide into civil war.
Few doubt that the Taliban are behind the purge. However, in the murky fields of Afghan conflicts, where terror groups and insurgents trade with mafia cartels and drug gangs, suspicion is rife that groups other than the Taliban may be involved to silence the educated elite.
Yama Siawash, a former TV newsreader, was killed in Kabul with two other men by a mine placed under his vehicle in November, while on his way to work at Afghanistan’s government-owned Central Bank. His family say the murder investigation may have been rigged to mask the involvement of mafia elements in government.