09-14-2005, 01:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-14-2005, 01:44 PM by reepicheep.)
I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Over 1,000 Canadian soldiers from my home town are currently in Afghanistan, helping the Afghan government bring order to their country.
A columnist from "The Edmonton Journal" newspaper writes a column where he talks about some of the experiences of the Canadian soldiers in Iraq. Here is an excerpt from today's story about a female police officer who was forced from her job by the taliban.
Quote:A television producer could make a reality TV series on Captain Jamilla Barakzai's life called CSI Kandahar, but no one would believe it.
Last June, as a crime scene investigator, the 35 year old mother of two was summoned to a local mosque to investigate a taliban inspired bombing that killed the Kandahar police chief and a dozen other worshippers. Three weeks ago, she examined the body of a murdered mujahadeen leader whose tongue had been cut out before he was stabbed in both of his eyes and died. His assailant or assailants then cut the victim's face in half, down the centre.
Barakzai's male colleagues couldn't stand to look at the corpse, much less handle it. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and got to work.
"I counted the stab wounds, photographed them, looked for documents on his body and checked his fingernails for any hair or skin left under them from a struggle," Barakzai says.
...
Five years ago, and after a decade of police work, Barakzai had been fired by the ultra-conservative taliban government because she was a woman. Like all women in Afghanistan she was confined to her house except for the rare occasion when she went out on a domestic errand.
"The first time I went out I did not wear a burrqa," she says. "The religious police lashed me with an electrical cable. After that lashing I wore a burqa."
She feels the 2001 defeat of the taliban by a coalition of western and Afghan forces hasn't changed her, however. It has simply restored her status to what it was when she entered a student police academy in her mid-teens.
"When the taliban left I went to my old office, found my personal documents and went back to work," she says.
...
Several weeks ago she took a firearms course from Canadian military instructors at the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team compound in Kandahar. The weapon she used was a box-fresh Hungarian version of the AK-47 assault rifle. She learned to dismantle, clean, reassemble and fire the weapon. When the course was over, she got to take the rifle home as her new police weapon.
This must be the worst nightmare of the taliban: an armed woman who knows how to defend herself. Instead of hiding at home as the taliban demanded of all women, Captain Barakzai is out on the streets of Kandahar, helping make Afghanistan a safe place to live.
Edmonton's soldiers from "The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry" are proud to be in Afghanistan, helping to restore freedom to Muslims like Captain Jamilla Barakzai.