Suicide: Afghan women's other plight

The mother of nineteen-year-old Zahara holds her hand while she lies in her hospital bed. Zahara, trapped in an unhappy marriage, attempted to commit suicide by burning herself with petrol.

The West debates its role in the country -- meanwhile, 23,000 women try to kill themselves each year

By Judy Mandelbaum
Salon.com

This originally appeared on Judy Mandelbaum's Open Salon blog.

Time magazine's recent depiction of a mutilated woman on its cover to illustrate "what happens if we leave Afghanistan" (without a question mark, mind you) has heated tempers on all sides of the debate over the American occupation of that nation. As Antiwar.com's Jeff Huber put it today, "If [Time editor Richard] Stengel wanted to show us what is really happening, why didn't he run images of Taliban leaders receiving bribe money that came from the United States? Why not show pictures of President Hamid Karzai's political machine stealing the most recent election? Why not show the heroin crop our military has been ordered not to destroy? Let's see the innocent women and children that we have maimed and killed in the course of pursuing a war that weakens our nation's security and is counter to our best interests."

The list is endless, but another candidate for the next Time cover could be an image of one of the growing number of Afghan women who are taking their own lives. According to a report that former Afghan Health Minister Faizullah Kakar, who now works as a health adviser to President Hamid Karzai, submitted on July 31, more and more women aged between fifteen and forty are attempting suicide. Based on health ministry and hospital records, some 23,000 women and girls are trying to kill themselves each year, "a several-fold increase on three decades ago."

Kakar blames the suicide epidemic on untreated mental illness and health issues, social disorder, loss of loved ones, poverty, rape, domestic violence, the general hopelessness of a country engulfed in permanent war, as well as the socio-economic hardships Afghan women are forced to endure every day. 1.8 million women and girls suffer from "severe depression," Kakar says.

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