GLOBAL JIHAD:Schoolgirls in the gunsights of the Taliban

WITH their teacher absent,10 students were allowed to leave school early.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.A 13-year-old named Shukria was shot in the arm and the back, and teetered into 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 had already shot,finishing off 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 colour of the concealing wheat.Six girls were shot here on the sunny afternoon last month;two of them died.
The Qalai Sayedan School,considered among the 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 dared to return.Shootings,beheadings,burnings and bombings are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of schools.To take aim at education is to make war on the government.Parents find themselves with terrible choices."It is better for my children to be alive even if it means they must be illiterate,"said Sayed Rasul,a father who decided to keep his two daughters at home.There has been some progress towards development in Afghanistan,but most often the nation seems astride some pitiable rocking horse,with each lurch forward inevitably reversed by the back-spring of harsh reality.
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As in the days of Noah...