AFGHANISTAN: Afghan women are still forced into marriages not of their choosing. The escape for some is unthinkable, James Astill reports from Kabul.
White-bearded Col Nazir Shah sifts through a pile of magazines for teenage girls.
"Look at what our sweet girls are suffering," says Mr Shah, a retired Afghan army officer, poring over the letters pages. "These are real stories about girls who are suffering so much. Look 'My family's choice of husband is driving me to suicide'."
Mr Shah has a special interest in the trials of Afghanistan's young women.
Six months ago, after being bullied by her in-laws once too often, his 26-year-old daughter Mallali Nurzi soaked herself in petrol and struck a match.
Alerted by her screams, Mallali's baby daughter discovered her mother writhing in a ball of flame. By the time the fire was extinguished, Mallali was burnt black all over. It then took her 24 hours to die.
In a suicide note to her parents, Mallali explained why she had chosen such a horrific end.
"Her husband's family were treating her like an animal," said Mr Shah, tears trickling down his sunburned cheeks.
"Every minute of every day, she was fetching water, growing crops, looking after animals and children, cleaning the house. She was patient, but it was too much for her. She was educated and sensitive. She found it hard to live like a slave."
Mallali was not alone in her suffering, nor the agonising way she chose to die. Anecdotal evidence suggests several hundred young women are burning themselves to death in western Afghanistan every year.
A government mission sent to investigate the problem in Herat, the capital of western Afghanistan, reported that at least 52 young married, or soon-to-be married, women had burnt themselves to death in the city in recent months. The youngest was a 13-year-old bride-to-be.
Mr Shah says he knows of more than 80 cases of self-immolation in western Fara province - where Mallali took her life - in the past two years. A niece of his was among the victims.
"There is not a village in Fara where a young woman has not burned herself to death," Mr Shah said.
Self-immolation has an unsavoury place in the histories of several Asian countries, as a traditional form of female suicide. But, unlike the Indian practice of suttee, for example, whereby widows are tossed onto their husband's funeral pyres, self-immolation in Afghanistan is not borne of cultural imperative, but despair. Also unlike suttee, the occurrence of self-immolation in Afghanistan seems to be increasing dramatically.
"In our culture, women have always burnt themselves, because they have always been so badly treated," said Ms Amina Safi Afzali, of the Afghan Human Rights Commission. "But, this phenomenon was never as prevalent as it is today."
Behind the alarming increase, says Ms Afzali, is a deep disillusionment felt by many educated Afghan women because the two years since the Taliban's fall have brought precious little freedom. This is felt most keenly among former refugees in Iran, who had grown accustomed to a freer life there.
Significantly, most of the female suicides recorded in Herat, a city close to Afghanistan's border with Iran, were educated women, including several nurses and teachers.
"There are many more pressures on young Afghan women today, because they have learned what freedom is from radio and television, but that is not what they have," Ms Afzali said.
"In the past, every girl knew she belonged to her family, she existed only for her father and her husband: she knew she wasn't free. Now, young girls know they should have rights, and they are prepared to burn themselves to show society that they do not have them yet."
Certainly, that seems true of Mallali. She had completed high school in Kabul and Iran, before being married off to live in a remote village. For 10 years, she suffered her in-laws' abuses, too loyal to complain of them but, ultimately, too sensitive to endure them.
"Mallali knew what her rights were because she was from an educated family in Kabul," says her grieving father. "But in the village she had no rights at all. She must have been suffering terribly, because she wasn't worried about the pain. She just wanted to die and be free, and this was her only way."
Afghanistan's recently ap- proved new constitution affords equal rights to men and women. But, despite an increase in the number of girls enrolled in school, most Afghan women enjoy no more rights than they did under the Taliban. Most of the country is not, in fact, controlled by the government, but by a rabble of warlords every bit as misogynistic as the former regime.
"Women in this country are in a very bad situation, with forced marriages, families selling their daughters to pay drug debts, women being beaten all the time," said the deputy women's minister, Suraya Sobah Rang. "We have to change these things in our society. But what society wants, and what women want are two different things."
Herat's warlord-governor, Ismail Khan, recently tried to face up to the fiery suicides in his city. In a televised visit to the burns ward of Herat's main hospital, he met Shakiba, a 19-year-old new bride, burned over 92 per cent of her body.
Roused to a whisper for the cameras, Shakiba said she had tried to kill herself after her family forced her to marry a man who was still living with his first wife, for a £5,000 dowry. "My family was selling me and I didn't know what else to do," she said.
Shakiba also complained that her husband had not given her a lavish wedding reception as he had promised. In response, Mr Khan ordered that all wedding reception centres be closed, to discourage families from throwing lavish receptions.
But, the centres stayed open; and, shortly afterwards, Shakiba died.