Last Sunday, there were 10 burn victims in the Herat hospital's burn ward, all women, the youngest a 14-year-old. Nosh Afreen, a physician, said 10 cases amounted to a slow day. Sometimes, she said, "we don't have one empty bed."
"Most of the women who want to commit suicide use this method," Afreen explained. "Actually, the women aren't aware of any other method to commit suicide. If they wanted to take pills, they don't know how many pills to take. So this is the only method they know."
After she was forced into a marriage, Zahara Mohamedi suffered from abuse until she decided to douse herself with oil and set herself on fire.
(Keith Richburg -- The Washington Post)
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As she spoke, a burn victim arrived, covered by a blue burqa, leaning on the arm of her husband and limping badly. When her husband saw a foreign journalist and his interpreter, he muttered, in an agitated voice: "These women ought to learn to be more careful when they're cooking!"
Later, the woman, 25, sat in a bed in the burn ward with most of her face swathed in gauze, only her eyes visible, and an intravenous drip in her arm. When questioned, her husband said that she had been preparing a meal in a pressure cooker when it exploded.
Afreen and members of the Human Rights Commission said husbands and other relatives of women who survive suicide attempts often try to cover up what happened out of shame and fear of criminal prosecution. In most self-immolation cases, police respond and file a report. Afreen said that, despite the investigations, "nothing happens."
In many ways, Mohamedi's story is typical.
She was born in Iran to parents who were refugees from western Afghanistan. They returned to Herat even before fall of the Taliban. The family was poor, with five girls and a boy. Her father tried to make ends meet by selling whatever he could find from a wheelbarrow. Mohamedi's education ended after the seventh grade.
Last year, a distant relative came with an offer: Two young men from a village an hour away would purchase her and her younger sister, then 15, to be their wives. When the money was paid, there was a lavish double wedding.
"Nobody asked me what I wanted to do, or did I like him or not," Mohamedi said. "When I found out they had engaged me to him, I said okay, if it's my family's wish, I'll do it for them."
From the beginning, she recalled, her life was hell. She was forbidden to go outside, even to see her younger sister, who lived 20 minutes away, or her mother in Herat. Her husband beat her regularly, sometimes for no reason, but most often for asking to leave the house.
Her in-laws, she said, were worse. She was treated like the family servant. At one point, her mother-in-law told her to take orders from her 11-year-old sister-in-law. "You should serve her like a servant," Mohamedi recalled the woman telling her. "Whatever she wants, you should do it."
Mohamedi constantly warned her husband that she was thinking of killing herself. But he only laughed, she said, and encouraged her.
"He thought I was just joking," she said. "I didn't know how to commit suicide. He was encouraging me, saying, 'Why not just burn yourself?' "
One night after dinner, she served tea to her father-in-law, returned to the kitchen, poured cooking oil over herself and set herself ablaze.
The family at first refused to take her to the hospital, instead placing her on a bed and fanning her scorched body. It was only when her sister found out what happened and came, and neighbors gathered outside, that the family took her to Herat's burn ward. At first, the in-laws said she had been in a cooking accident -- that her scarf caught fire. But her mother, Sharifa Ghulani, said she started screaming until she learned the truth.
Mohamedi spent 23 days in the burn ward. While there, she said, she saw 56 other women, all of whom had done the same thing. The youngest, she said, was 13.
She and her sister are now divorced from their abusive husbands. Mohamedi said she feels bad about her appearance but that her scars may serve as a lesson.
"It's not only a lesson for my younger sisters," she said. "It's also a lesson for all of our relatives and neighbors."
