Female Afghan MP injured but defiant after suicide attack

KABUL: Afghan women´s rights campaigner Shukria Barakzai speaks in a tired whisper as she recovers in hospital from an assassination attempt that nearly killed her a week ago, but her message is strong and clear.

"I don´t want the women of Afghanistan to be scared," she told AFP at her bedside in Kabul.

"I am waiting for my recovery and I will go back (to work). And this time I will work even harder than before.

"This attack was an attack on all women in Afghanistan -- this is not only on me."

Barakzai, a 41-year-old member of parliament, staggered from the wrecked remains of her car after it was hit by a suicide bomber on a main road near the parliament last Sunday.

She was still carrying her mobile phone and handbags as she was led away to safety, and she appeared to have not been seriously injured.

But the huge impact of the blast, which killed three nearby civilians, took its toll and she is being treated for shock as well as for burns on her left hand.

Barakzai is one of the most prominent female activists in Afghanistan, where women´s rights have been at the centre of radical changes during 13 years of international intervention since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Women, who were confined to the home and forced to wear all-encompassing burqas under the Taliban, have secured more freedoms, but Barakzai´s pro-equality stance has earned her a lot of enemies.

She has faced hostility from many conservative Muslim men and received regular death threats from Islamist groups, including Taliban insurgents.

"I had lots of threats, but this one was (nearly) successful," she said on Friday, sitting up in her bed with her outstretched hand covered in medical gauze.

"Am I such threat to them? I´m just a women working for women´s rights in Afghanistan.
"I´m surprised that the Taliban didn´t claim responsibility (for the attack)... It´s someone else."