From the Boston Globe:

SARKH DOZ, Afghanistan — Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have launched a campaign of arson, intimidation, and assassination targeting schools and teachers in southern Afghanistan, forcing some 200 schools to close in recent months, local officials say.
Five teachers have been killed, said Hayat Allah Rafiqi, head of the education department in Helmand province. Hundreds more teachers have received ”night letters” — threatening notices nailed to their houses under darkness, warning them to quit teaching or die.
”Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak,” Rafiqi said. ”By day the government rules, but by night it is the hand of the Taliban.”
The attacks, which President Hamid Karzai estimated have idled 100,000 students in the south, have undermined attempts by the government to revive the country’s educational system and teach both boys and girls — a key to Afghanistan’s recovery from decades of war. Girls were barred from attending school when the fundamentalist Islamic regime ruled the country in the 1990s.
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