Gunmen broke into Miyan Abdul Hakim school in Kandahar.

After they had terrorised the caretaker for doing the work of foreigners, they collected floor mats and desks to light bonfires inside the classrooms. Then they gathered all the dog-eared exercise books and school textbooks that they could find and threw them into the flames.

After a year's respite the Taleban has returned to attacking schools and intimidating teachers across much of the south and east of the country.

Since the beginning of the new school year on March 23 there have been 36 attacks. Empty buildings have been set on fire or had grenades thrown into them. Teachers have been kidnapped, and later released. In one grisly case a caretaker was mutilated by having his ears and nose cut off, a common punishment for those accused of collaborating with the Afghan Government.

The security situation is now so bad in Kandahar province that nearly half of all schools are closed some or all of the time. Girls' classes have been particularly badly hit because women teachers are too afraid to venture into rural districts where the Taleban is strong, threatening one of the successes of post-2001 Afghanistan.

All of the 40 schools in Marouf, one insurgency-affected district of Kandahar province, are now shut. Teachers fear that the situation could get as bad as it did in 2006 when nearly 200 schools were attacked. They worry that a new generation of Afghans is growing up uneducated and vulnerable to extremism.

Students are slowly returning to classes at a Kandahar City girls' school following an attack last week that left several girls with acid burns on their faces.

Compared to the first couple of days, there are more students coming to the school, said Mahmood Qaderi, the principal of Mirwais Minna girls' school.

None of the school's 1,500 students or teachers attended classes in the days following last Wednesday's attack. The students were seriously burned after two men on a motorcycle threw acid on them as they walked to the classes.

Afghanistan's government condemned the attack and blamed the country's enemies, a reference normally used to describe Taliban militants. Girls were banned from schools under the Taliban's hardline Islamist regime, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Qaderi said government officials have pledged to improve security near the school.

Susan Ibrahimi, one of the students burned by the acid, said she won't be deterred from going to school. The 18-year-old, who received minor burns to her face, said she supports Afghan President Hamid Karzai's weekend call for the public execution of the attackers: Whoever threw this acid poison at us, these people should be hanged. We don't want to forgive those people.

We are just educating our youth, said an unidentified teacher. They can't stop us. Even if they burn me, I wouldn't stop. I'd come to school and teach classes.

Update: Suspects Rounded Up

28th November. See article from independent.co.uk

A terrorist cell accused of squirting acid in schoolgirls' faces has been rounded up in southern Afghanistan. The country's President, Hamid Karzai, called for the perpetrators to face public executions.

Attending a reading and writing class could end in mutilation or murder for Afghan women — and simply leaving their homes could mean death. Christina Lamb returns to Afghanistan seven years after the fall of the Taliban and finds a country still rife with the persecution of females.

On a stony hillside overlooking the ancient city of Herat stands the graveyard of its most illustrious citizens. But there is one tombstone at which many women stop and genuflect. It is that of a 25-year-old woman called Nadia Anjuman, and the flowery Persian engraving describes her as a poet who risked her life to keep writing under the Taliban. What it doesn’t say is that she was killed by her own husband.

Nadia’s death is seen by her friends and women across Afghanistan as symbolising the betrayal by the international community of all their promises to free Afghan women — given as one of the main reasons for ousting the Taliban regime 7 years ago. What happened to Nadia should make the world bow its head in shame, says her friend and fellow writer Leila Razeqi: Your prime ministers and presidents promised freedom to us Afghan women. That someone like Nadia is under the soil and her husband walks free should make you ask what is really going on here.

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5 teachers and 40 pupils were overcome by fumes during a school ceremony in the capital of northern Parwan province.

Afghan officials said they were awaiting the results of blood tests to determine what had happened, but there were unconfirmed local reports a bottle had been thrown into the playground beforehand

One teacher at Sadiqi Padshah School in Charikar, who did not wish to be named, said the whole school had been standing in the playground listening to staff speeches when students began to collapse: We didn't know what was happening, all the children just went down and we took them to hospital. Victims were treated for severe headaches and streaming eyes after the attack on Sunday morning, 40 miles north of Kabul, but the provincial governor said all had made a full recovery.

Taliban-led insurgents opposed to the central government or girls' education continue to attack schools and teachers. In 2008, there were 292 attacks on schools, with 92 people killed and 169 injured.

Responding to threats from the Taliban, at least 10 girls' schools have shut down near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

When the deputy director of Aqtash High School talks of the government, he isn't referring to Hamid Karzai's central government in Kabul. Nor does he refer to the provincial administration in Kunduz. The Taliban are our government, Bashir says: They have taken over our region, their commanders give the orders here.

Bashir is standing in a dusty classroom on the ground floor of his modern school. As recently as just one month ago, he says, some 400 girls were still coming to the school in three daily shifts to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Figures and formula are still scrawled across the blackboard.

But now, the girls' classrooms have been left to deteriorate. The desks and chairs are still laid out in neat rows, but a film of dust has collected, and Bashir stands helplessly in the middle of the room. Parents in Aqtash are afraid to send their girls to school anymore, after the death threats, he explains. The school director speaks quietly and carefully. He too is afraid, and several of his teachers double as informants for the Taliban. The bearded fighters, he says, would certainly not like it if they knew a reporter was at the school in Aqtash. You should leave quickly if you want to get out of Aqtash alive, he whispers.

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Rape in Afghanistan is widespread and violence against women serving in public life is on the rise, a UN report has said.

The 32-page report denounces an institutional failure to curb violence against women and a culture of impunity that leaves such crimes unpunished.

The limited space that opened up for Afghan women following the demise of the Taliban regime in 2001 is under sustained attack, not just by the Taliban themselves, but by deeply engrained cultural practices and customs, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

Pillay also denounced a chronic failure at all levels of government to advance the protection of women's rights in Afghanistan despite significant advances in the creation of new legislation and institutions.

The report, issued by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned of a growing trend of violence and threats against women in public life.

Violence, in the public and private spheres, is an everyday occurrence in the lives of a huge proportion of Afghan women, the report said.

Parliamentarians, provincial council members, civil servants, journalists, women working for international organisations . . . have been targeted by anti-government elements, by local traditional and religious power-holders, by their own families and communities, and in some instances by government authorities, it said.

Preliminary data suggests that rape is a widespread occurrence in all parts of Afghanistan and in all communities, and all social groups, it said.

Women are also the victims of so-called 'honour' killings, trafficking and abduction, as well as early and forced marriages and domestic violence, it said. Girls and women are exchanged to resolve disputes over land and property.

The report also documents numerous attacks on girls' schools and students who are assaulted with gas and acid by anti-government elements.

Women in Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan say they are once again being threatened, attacked and forced out of jobs and education as fears rise that their rights will be sacrificed as part of any deal with insurgents to end the war in Afghanistan.

Women have reported attacks and received letters warning of violence if they continue to work or even contact radio stations to request songs.

One female teacher at a girls' school in a southern Afghan province received a letter saying: We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut off the heads of your children and will set fire to your daughter.

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