Night Letter from Wardak

Translation:

By the Name of the Great God

A Hadith [a saying of the Prophet Mohammed]: Whoever acts like them is one of them [Arabic].

Respected Afghans: Leave the culture and traditions of the Christians and Jews. Do not send your girls to school, otherwise, the mujahedin of the Islamic Emirates will conduct their robust military operations in the daylight.

Wa-alsallam
By the office of the Islamic Mujahedin

A local education official told Human Rights Watch that "Almost every school has received threats."

Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, straddles the road from Kabul to Kandahar. Abdul Rabb al Rasul Sayyaf, a warlord with a long record of human rights abuses as far back as the 1980s to the present, exercises a great deal of political and social influence over the province from his neighboring stronghold of Paghman.

Efforts to educate girls in Wardak have faced serious difficulties. According to official statistics from the Ministry of Education, in 2004-2005, only a quarter of students enrolled in school were girls; in one district, Saydabad, the education director placed the proportion lower, stating that girls and women made up only around one-fifth of the district's students, even counting those attending NGO schools, some of which may not provide formal education. There was one high school for girls that, in 2005, ran only through grade ten.

Wardak experienced a series of attacks on schools in 2005 and threats against schools, teachers, and other education officials. In December 2005, Human Rights Watch interviewed several teachers and education officials from the province who at first denied there were any security problems, then admitted that problems did exist, but blamed the Taliban-even though the province's distance from the Pakistani border and the influence of Sayyaf's forces make such a contention unlikely.