KABUL, Afghanistan, June 25 (UPI) -- Kabul police were investigating an apparent attempt on the life of an Afghan woman politician and women's rights activist who was fired on in her home.
Suraya Parlika told police she was using a telephone on her balcony in Kabul's Microryan District Tuesday when "someone fired three shots at me," she said.
For Parlika, who is a parliamentary candidate in Afghanistan's elections planned for September, it was a second escape from an assassin's bullet. Last year she was apparently shot at during a home burglary.
The leader of the "Afghanistan All Women Association," Parlika was unable to say who might have been behind the attack on either occasion. "The bullets narrowly passed by my head and hit the window frame," she was quoted as saying of Tuesday's attempt. "I don't know who they were, but they can't stop my struggle for the rights of women."
Parlika is a former politician from the Communist era who ran underground schools for girls under the Taliban regime, which banned girls from gaining an education and women from working. Since the collapse of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in late 2001, several women's associations have emerged in the war-battered country.
Women made limited advances in Afghanistan's new constitution introduced earlier this year, but the country remains deeply conservative. One woman, Dr. Massouda Jalal, wants to stand against President Hamid Karzai in the upcoming elections.
