SHAMED and ostracised except for the company of her distraught mother, Rana lies on a filthy bed in the burns ward of Herat’s central hospital, blinded, terribly burnt and speechless. Her slow death is accompanied by the cries of other pained young women in the beds around her.

Two months ago Rana was doused in fuel and set aflame by her husband for the second time in a year. Now she has no hope of survival. “I sit here and pray to Allah that she shall die,” Pirozan, her 60-year-old mother, says. “The doctors say nothing and there is nothing to say.”

According to human rights officials and women’s groups in Afghanistan, Rana is but one of scores of victims of a scourge of abuse of women in the west of the country, manifested in either self- immolation or attempted murder.

“We have recorded 80 cases in Herat’s hospital this year alone of women who have either been burnt or self- immolated, and that figure does not include those who have been beaten or otherwise attacked. Herat is the worst instance in the country,” Nader Nadery, an official for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said. “Some women burnt to death never reach the hospital, so the true record is even higher.”

Rana, 22, married her cousin, Siraj, as a refugee in Iran. She gave birth to a daughter when she was 15, and a son a year later. Returning to Herat with her husband after the fall of the Taleban in 2001, her relationship with Siraj became strained after he took a second wife 11 months ago.

In January her mother was at home when a neighbour banged on the door. “They told me Rana was terribly sick and may die,” Pirozan recalled. “I knew she was hoping she was pregnant and thought there was a complication. I rushed to the hospital and instead found her with 58 per cent burns.”

Rana told her mother that her husband had burnt her as she had become an irritation to him and his new wife. Siraj claimed that she was psychologically ill and had tried to commit suicide.

Sima Sher Mohammedi, the Herat branch director of the organisation Afghans Defending Women’s Rights, says that she documents between ten and fifteen burnings a month in the city, the result either of self-immolation or the attack of a spouse or in-law.

“Gasoline is readily available in the home and immolation is part of a culture copied by refugees returning from Iran,” she said. She added that the immolation epidemic is particularly acute in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city. Herati women are better educated than their counterparts in the Pashtun south, so have a wider perception of liberty and are more likely to resent forced marriages and the restrictions of a traditional Islamic society.

By contrast, there are fewer burnings in Kandahar, where women are ill-educated, accept forced marriage as the norm and expect less from their life.

Kabul also has fewer burnings, but for the opposite reason: the capital is relatively more liberal, forced marriage less common and women have more opportunity to be heard. Six burnings have been documented there in the past four months.

The police and hospital authorities in Herat are also loath to investigate the burning of women — a cultural taboo in Afghanistan.

“Less than 1 per cent of the women in our burns ward are there because of immolation,” Dr Shahram, director of Herat’s hospital, insisted. But he admitted: “We don’t ask women why they are burnt. We are a hospital, not a police investigation unit.”

Ms Mohammedi claimed in the doctor’s defence that hospital staff had been dismissed for telling journalists about the true level of abuse and that the police were still reluctant to prosecute guilty spouses.

Rana spent six months recovering in hospital after her first burning, then returned home. Due to the strictures of her culture, her husband did not wish to divorce her. She did not wish to leave him as she would lose her two children.

A month later some shepherds found her lying by a track in Nawabad desert outside Herat, again scorched and blackened by flame.

Taken back to hospital, she told her mother before her speech failed her that Siraj, his second wife and his father had driven her out into the desert and set fire to her once more. All three were arrested. A fortnight ago, Pirozan said, they were released from prison — a credible claim. “Usually a husband who burns his wife, if he goes to jail at all, stays there for seven to eight months then he bribes himself out,” Ms Mohammedi said.

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