Taliban Night Letter From Ghazni

Translation:

Greetings toward the respected director [of education] of Ghazni province, Fatima Moshtaq. I have one request, that you step aside from your duties. Otherwise, if you don't resign your position and continue your work, something will happen that will transform your family and you to grief. I am telling you this as a brother, that I consider you a godless person. I am telling you to leave your post and if you continue your work, I will do something that doesn't have a good ending. It should not be left unsaid that one day in the Jan Malika school I heard Wali Sahib praise Ahmad Shah Masood, I wanted transform your life to death and with much regret Wali Assadullah was present there and I didn't do anything to cause your death. But if you don't resign your work, I will attack you and take you to death.

With respects,
27 Meezan 1384

At the bottom (last paragraph):
Look dear Fatima consider your poor employee who will suffer. He was in front of the house look at how many body guards you have for instance the one who was there but if you have them it doesn't matter to us. I was following you from 4 in the afternoon till 7 at night.
With Respects.

A teacher from troubled Gilan district, south of Ghazni city, told us. "Last year in April [2005] our school was closed by the Taliban for two months, they threatened us and told us this school must be closed. Night letters are regularly sent."

An official in the provincial education department described problems in Andar district: "The teachers are threatened and told not to go to school. . . . At the moment there is no school for girls in Andar though we are trying for it. . . A lot of night letters have been sent to teachers and students, even to the mosques. The teachers, headmasters, and modirs [principals] were and are threatened continuously. The police and ANA [Afghan National Army] are very weak-they are not in a position to bring any security or peace. Usually the night letters are signed by Jaish al-Muslemin or Taliban. No schools have been burned in Andar, but three schools were burned in Giro in May this year. In Hale Khojiri school, some teachers were threatened and told if they continued to go to school, their blood would be on their own hands.

The historic city of Ghazni, about four hours drive south of Kabul, was the center of an empire covering much of northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and eastern Iran in the eleventh century. Today it is capital of one of Afghanistan's more volatile provinces. The international community largely suspended operations there in May 2003, when a French UNHCR employee was killed in Ghazni city. The city itself is relatively calm, but much of the province is beset by opposition groups, including the Taliban, those associated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and local criminal gangs. Broadly speaking, areas south of the ring road are considered seriously unsafe, while northern areas are calmer.

Local education officials blame the Taliban for some of the attacks on education in Ghazni. In other cases, evidence indicates criminal responsibility; for instance, a particularly brutal attack during which killed two education officials in early December 2005 was blamed on robbers, because the officials were robbed of the payrolls they were carrying, contrary to the usual practice of the ideologically motivated groups.

Overall, in 2004-2005, 31 percent of students officially enrolled in school in Ghazni were girls. But enrollment was much higher in districts north of the ring road than those south of it. The two districts (out of eighteen) with no girls enrolled were in southern Ghazni.