In the 10 years since the ouster of the Taliban, great strides have been made for women in Afghanistan, with many attending school, working in offices and even sometimes marching in protests. But abuse and repression of women are still common, particularly in rural areas where women are still unlikely to set foot outside of the house without a burqa robe that covers them from head to toe.
The man in the latest case, Sher Mohammad, 30, fled the Khanabad district in Kunduz province last week, about the time a neighbor found his 22-year-old wife dead in their house, said District Police Chief Sufi Habibullah. Medical examiners whom police brought to check the body said she had been strangled, Habibullah said.
The woman, named Estorai, had warned family members that her husband had repeatedly reproached her for giving birth to a daughter rather than a son, and had threatened to kill her if it happened again, said Provincial women's affairs chief Nadira Ghya, who traveled to Khanabad to deal with the case.
Estorai gave birth to her second daughter between two and three months ago, Ghya said. Officials did not have a family name for either Sher Mohammad or Estorai.
Police took the man's mother into custody because she appears to have collaborated in a plot to kill her daughter-in-law, Habibullah said.
Ghya, who visited the man's mother in jail, said that she swears that Estorai committed suicide by hanging. Police said they found no rope and no evidence of hanging from the woman's wounds.
Boy babies are traditionally prized much more highly than girls in Afghanistan, where a son means a breadwinner and a daughter is seen as a drain on the family until she is married off. Even so, a murder over the gender of a baby would be rare and shocking if proved true.
The U.S. Embassy issued a statement Monday praising the Afghan government for recent declarations supporting women's rights in the wake of the latest abuse cases that have garnered media attention. "The rights of women cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs, as this issue is at the core of our national security and the security of people everywhere," the statement said. It did not address the killing of the young woman in Kunduz.
Heather Barr, a researcher for Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said there was a cultural tolerance for violence against women and impunity for men who committed it. "What is most disappointing is that the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law was supposed to change this, and it has had very little impact so far," Barr said.
This article contains information from the New York Times.
