Some Afghan women resort to self-immolation

Some Afghan women are resorting to fiery suicides to escape what are often powerless and bleak lives, the New York Times reports in a dispatch from the region.

One hospital in central Afghanistan saw a spike in the number of women brought to the center with body-enveloping burns in October, according to the Times. The nation's Ministry of Women's Affairs documented 103 cases of women who set themselves on fire between March 2009 and March 2010--and the reported number is probably a fraction of the total cases, according to a July Time story on the problem.

Why are women turning to such a violent and painful method of suicide?

Cooking oil and matches are available in even the poorest of homes, and some women believe wrongly that self-immolation leads to a quick and painless death, the Times says.

Depression and other forms of mental illness are also unrecognized, untreated and stigmatized in homes under the Taliban regime.

Most Afghan women are powerless to escape abusive husbands. About 45 percent of women in the country marry before they are 18 -- many of them before they are 16. Women who are given away in marriage as payments for debts often lead lives of servitude, the Times says.

The chilling dispatch is another reminder of the Taliban's horrendous treatment of women--and a reminder that the cultural legacy of Taliban leaders is firmly intact, even in places where they are no longer in power. After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, women were banned from attending school or interacting with any men who were not blood relations, among many other restrictions.

Over the weekend, the Taliban sent a long, rambling letter to Congress contending that America cannot win the war in Afghanistan, and suggesting that U.S. lawmakers visit the country to better understand what's going on. The group is trying to position itself as a legitimate political power in the region, and President Hamid Karzai said this month that he has been engaged in informal talks with the insurgent group for "quite some time."

(Photo of women descending the stairs of a shopping center Sunday in Herat, western Afghanistan: AP/Reza Shirmohammadi)