Her Husband Shot This 17-Year-Old Afghan Girl In The Face

Shakila grew up in Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city, Mazar-e Sharif, as one of six children in an impoverished family. When she was 17, she was pulled out of school, where she’d reached a seventh-grade level, and married to her 31-year-old cousin. It was a wedding arranged due to financial necessity. “I didn’t want it to happen, even though we were poor—I didn’t want her to go into that family,” her mother, 43-year-old Sherman Jan, says in Farsi through a translator. “There was no other way.” Her younger sister was removed from school as well, at the insistence of her new family.

The family’s financial strain was due in part to her father’s illness, which had left him comatose in the hospital. It wasn’t until her father’s condition deteriorated and he grew nearer to death that Shakila’s mother realized the dangerous situation her daughter was in. The cousin’s family refused to let Shakila visit him in the hospital, unmoved by her mother’s calls and pleas. Finally, they agreed, and shortly after Shakila arrived at his bedside, he passed away.

In the meantime, Shakila had been suffering at home since her wedding, beaten at the hands of her in-laws who were displeased with her lack of domestic training. She wasn’t ready for marriage, her mother says. “When I called her she would say, ‘I’m happy, things are OK,’” Sherman Jan remembers. But, as she later found out, the family would gather around the phone to monitor each call and threaten Shakila with abuse for complaining.

When her father died, Shakila and her in-laws were traveling from the funeral when they got into a car accident. Her mother-in-law was injured and had to seek medical attention. After that, the family took out their anger at the treatment costs on Shakila.

Not long after, she was kicked out of her husband’s house, and arrived home to her mother, who until then was unaware of her abuse. “When she came to the house she was black and blue from times they had really badly abused her,” she says.

That night, Sherman Jan was praying when she heard a large bang. It was already dark and their house doesn’t have electricity, but when she ran toward the front of the house, she saw her daughter on the floor. Shakila had been shot point-blank in the face with a hunting gun, as the medical report says. Her mother panicked, running to get help, and Shakila was soon transported to the local hospital, which was poorly equipped to treat her traumatic injuries. The next morning, on November 10, she was brought by car over 260 miles of bumpy, mountainous roads to the Italian-run Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul, arriving 12 hours after the shooting.

Medical records show Shakila’s injuries included “complete destruction” of her major sinus, her nose cartilages and nasal bones, and her left eye. Scans of her skull show shredded bone along the bullet’s path. “Last surgical procedure aim has been to approximate and close as much as possible facial skin on the left side of face,” the nurse’s report reads. Shakila underwent five surgeries, as doctors struggled to cover her wound, which they eventually realized was impossible to do. After a visit to the maternity ward, she learned she’d miscarried a six-week pregnancy.