Nearly 90 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned, officials suspect

Eighty-nine schoolgirls and their teachers in northern Afghanistan were hospitalized this weekend with respiratory and neurological symptoms.

On Saturday, 63 students and staff at Kabod Aab School — an elementary school for girls in northern Sar-i-Pul province — fell ill shortly after arriving in their classrooms that morning, officials and parents of those students said.

The next day, 26 more students along with staff members from the nearby Faiz Abad Girls’ School fell ill and reported similar symptoms.

The suggestion that someone had tried to poison schoolgirls shocked young girls and their parents in this region of Afghanistan, where restrictions on education have become a focal point since the Taliban seized power in 2021 and are symbolic of the government’s policy towards women that effectively got them out of the way. public life.

Local Afghan officials said they believed the poisonings were motivated by local animosities between villages. Several local elders and residents were skeptical of that claim.

Girls are not allowed to go to school above sixth grade in Afghanistan, but they are allowed to go to primary schools, so most of the girls who got sick were 6 to 12 years old.

The students and staff were hospitalized with shortness of breath, weakness, nausea and headaches, and many were put on ventilators, their relatives said. About half of them had been fired by Monday, according to local officials.

“Unknown people spread toxic substances in the classrooms, and when the students entered the classrooms, they experienced shortness of breath, watery eyes and nose, and lost consciousness,” said Umair Sarpuli, the director of culture and information in the province.

Security and intelligence agencies were still searching for the perpetrators, local officials said, at a time of uncertainty for girls across Afghanistan.

In March last year, the Taliban government banned girls from attending secondary schools and in November, it banned women from going to university. Women have been too forbidden to go to many public places such as gyms and parks, travel a considerable distance without a male relative and working in most areas beyond the private sector and healthcare.

The government policies to roll back women’s rights have come to define how Western countries view the Taliban, diplomats and observers say, and have drawn near-universal condemnation, including from Islamist governments such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The problems at the two schools were first reported around 8 a.m. Saturday, parents and local elders said. Shortly after the teachers started their daily lessons at Kabod Aab School, two children started having convulsions and struggled to breathe.

The school principal sent the two children home, thinking they had the common flu. But within 20 minutes, dozens of students began showing similar symptoms and were taken by car to a local clinic.

Qasim Qurban, 38, a farmer in the district, was working in his field when a neighbor ran over and told him his daughters had fallen ill, he said. He went to the local clinic and found his 10-year-old daughter, Sabera, and 13-year-old daughter, Hadia, struggling with labored breathing. The two girls were then transferred to the provincial hospital.

“Every half hour or every hour they would have shortness of breath and then they would be put on a ventilator,” he said.

The next day, dozens of other Faiz Abad Girls’ School students fell ill with similar symptoms, officials said.

For more than a decade, Afghanistan had experienced sporadic incidents of suspected poisonings in girls’ schools across the country. Under the previous Western-backed government, officials often blamed the Taliban for the attacks – a claim the Taliban denied at the time.

In 2012, nearly 300 schoolgirls in northern Takhar province fell ill. A year later, about 200 schoolgirls fell ill in a similar incident in the capital Kabul. In another major incident in 2016, about 600 schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan’s Herat province were targeted by what officials say was poisonous gas.

Earlier this year, similar incidents then received attention in neighboring Iran hundreds of schoolgirls were hospitalized in what Iranian officials say may have been deliberate poisonings designed to prevent girls from attending school.

The two affected schools remained closed on Monday as security forces conducted their investigations, but across the province, the episodes renewed concern among parents, some of whom were already worried about the safety of their daughters attending primary schools.

Since the Taliban seized power and rolled back women’s rights, many parents worry that those who oppose girls’ education feel empowered to act with impunity — and could carry out attacks on girls’ schools, they say.

“Everyone is scared, and we should be scared, because the poisoning of the students is serious,” said Hassan Haidari, whose daughter is a teacher at Kabod Aab School and was hospitalized on Saturday. On Monday, she was still in serious condition and on a ventilator in the provincial hospital.

“People want to know who did this to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Mr Haidari said. “Otherwise no one will send their daughter to school.”