beyondBeijing2008.com

HERAT, Afghanistan – We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.

Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.

Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said. 

But Dr. Mohamed Aref Jalali, the director of the burns unit, said Shirin told him in private that she had set herself on fire deliberately after fighting with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law.

Adrienne Mong/ NBC News

Rezagul set herself on fire to escape her marriage to an abusive and much older husband.

Many girls in Afghanistan think self-immolation is the best solution for family problems, according to Jalali.

“[For these girls], it’s no good to solve the problem with the father-in-law, with the mother-in-law,” said the doctor. ”They think self-immolation will solve the problem.”

It’s a “solution” that appears to a major problem in Afghanistan, particularly among young women between the ages 13 and 25.

In the first seven months of this year, medical staff at the Heart’s burns unit – the only one of its kind in the entire country – said they have seen 51 cases of female self-immolation. Only 13 have survived.   

The practice comes from Iran, where many Afghan refugees had fled to during the decade long war with the Soviet Union (1979-1989) and the era of mujahideen fighting that followed in the 1990s, said Jalali. But its popularity has spread among Afghan women, often from poor, uneducated backgrounds, where the tradition of child or forced marriages runs strong.

“The forced marriage is the best reason and the important reason, and it starts from the economic problem,” said Jalali. 

Often in arranged marriages, women are viewed in very stark terms. 

“She is here only to wash, to clean, to give baby…and nothing more,” said Marie-Jose Brunel, a French volunteer nurse at the burns unit who was full of Gallic warmth and purposeful seriousness. ”If they have no freedom, no possibility to study, to be considered like nothing, it’s very, very difficult.”