Death threats force Afghan acid victim into hiding

Four years after a militiaman doused Mumtaz with a flesh-searing acid for rejecting his marriage proposal, leaving her disfigured, scarred and traumatised, death threats have forced the 20-year-old Afghan into hiding.

Her ordeal encapsulates the major issues roiling Afghanistan - a silent tsunami of violence against women, anti-Taliban militias bringing further turmoil to an already conflict-torn country and a seemingly dysfunctional state unable to offer Afghans even a modicum of security.

Swaddled in a cobalt blue scarf partly covering her jagged facial scars, Mumtaz vividly recalls the horrors of that night when the jilted lover stormed into her house with six other assailants, holding up the corrosive liquid.

“He grabbed me by my hair and hurled the acid at my face with such vengeance, as if to say ‘now let’s see who will marry you’,” Mumtaz, who goes by one name, told AFP in a safe house in the volatile northern province of Kunduz.

She remembers screaming and writhing as the acid, some of which splattered on her sisters and mother, burned through her flesh.

Mumtaz has undergone multiple surgeries and painful skin grafts since the attack in 2011 - and is now forced to live in hiding due to threats purportedly from the assailants, some of whom are still at large. Her plight is worsened by an escalating conflict in Kunduz, where the Taliban recently launched a large-scale offensive, creeping ever closer to the provincial capital and trapping civilians between insurgents and a miscellany of pro-government forces and militias.

Statistics <g data-gr-id="27">are</g> scant but acid attacks are common in Afghanistan, often used to deface and cripple women even for minor transgressions such as refusing to wear a <g data-gr-id="28">head scarf</g> or rebuffing unsolicited lovers.

The daughter of a wheat farmer stopped going out unchaperoned and avoided the main village thoroughfares.

He escaped after the horrific attack but a court sentenced three of his accomplices to a decade in prison, a rare judgement in a nation that offers female victims little legal recourse.

Armed intruders have attempted to break into her house, said Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organisation which helped Mumtaz with legal aid and seeking treatment for acid burns in India.

“We are very concerned about her safety,” Haseena Sarwari, the Kunduz manager for WAW, said.