Fears of a lost generation of Afghan pupils as Taliban targets schools

Arson attacks and death threats have turned playgrounds into battlegrounds in Helmand

Declan Walsh in Sarkh Doz

Thursday March 16, 2006

Guardian

Class is out at Sarkh Doz, a sleepy village near the sweeping Helmand river. A ghostly silence fills the school playground, the gate is bolted shut and the proud yellow classrooms have been reduced to a blackened shell of cinders. Taliban arsonists set the blaze, locals say. One night a car full of militants roared up, doused the building in petrol and struck a match. Then they continued to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched that school too.

Now both buildings - recently built with American funding - are deserted, the teachers have fled and another body blow has been dealt to aid efforts in Helmand, the southern province where 3,300 British troops are deploying. "Terrible," said police chief Ahmed Samonwal, shaking his head as he walked past the blackened schools. "This is the work of our enemies." Playground has become battleground in the Afghan south, where the resurgent Taliban have launched a fierce campaign of arson, intimidation and assassination that has closed 200 schools in recent months and left 100,000 students at home.

Teachers are in the front line. In December assassins dragged a man who defied warnings to stop teaching girls from his classroom in Nad Ali, another Helmand district, and shot him at the school gate. Four other teachers have been killed and hundreds more threatened with "night letters" - handwritten notices delivered in the dark, ordering them to stop teaching or die.

The terror campaign underscores the challenge facing British troops in securing a province ruled by terror as much as central government. "Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak," said the provincial education head Hayat Allah Rafiqi. "By day the government rules but by night it is in the hands of the Taliban."

Sixty-six of Helmand's 224 schools have closed, he said, and others have scaled back classes as parents move their children to the safety of the main towns. Even there, protection is uncertain. Two days after the Nad Ali murder, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student. The attack occurred less than a mile from the new British base.

"We are always afraid of being shot or attacked on our way home," said Gul Ali, a female teacher of chemistry and biology at the school.

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