Pubdate: Fri, 03 Jun 2005
Source: Daily Press (Newport News,VA)
Copyright: 2005 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.dailypress.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/585
Author: Kim Barker
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

TRADING BURQAS FOR CAMOUFLAGE

Afghan Women Take Up Arms In War On Narcotics

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Faozia Mirakai grinned widely and held her gun as if 
she might drop it. But if threatened, she said, she could be a killer.

Mirakai wore a green camouflage uniform and tan boots. The young woman 
punched her fists into the air alongside the Afghan men training to be 
anti-drug officers. She walked with a slight swagger. She jumped with the 
men, tried to do one-armed push-ups with them and marched with them. She 
made faces at the men and joked around.

"Don't try to hit me," Mirakai said, pointing a Czech rifle in their direction.

In most countries, the sight of a female police officer would hardly be 
interesting. But this is Afghanistan, where women were banned from working 
for years. Many women still are forced to stay at home. Many still wear 
burqas, which cover everything, even a woman's eyes.

A woman such as Mirakai, brandishing a gun and wearing only a camouflage 
cap over her hair, is a shocking sight here. She did not cover her face or 
her chin-length brown hair while training in the streets of Kabul. The 
other woman on the training course did, wearing a black sleeve over her 
head and dark sunglasses. Wahida Raufi feared what might happen if someone 
saw her.

"I do not want to be recognized," admitted Raufi, 25.

Raufi and Mirakai graduated from the anti-drug police course Wednesday 
after six weeks of training. Ten other women already work for Afghanistan's 
counternarcotics police. They wear flak vests, ride in helicopters and 
carry guns and handcuffs, just like the men.

They say they are prepared to arrest criminals and fire their weapons.

"If enemies try to shoot me, I will fire first," says Mirakai, who probably 
will attend the police academy before starting as an anti-drug officer. "I 
will kill them, before they kill me."

These women are in some way symbols, a tentative effort at the equality 
between the sexes guaranteed by the new Afghan Constitution. There are, 
after all, 118 male anti-drug officers, officials say.

But the women also are a part of the country's fight against the growing 
drug trade.

Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, opium poppies have blossomed 
into one of the largest challenges to the country's stability. In early 
March, the State Department warned that Afghanistan is in danger of 
becoming a narcotics state. Opium, heroin and marijuana move easily 
throughout the country.

Women used as mules

Male police officers cannot search women or women's rooms because of 
Islamic rules and cultural traditions. Drug traffickers know that. They've 
started hiding drugs and weapons with women.

"It's really embarrassing if a man touches the clothes of another man's 
wife, or of any woman," says Gen. Mohammad Asif Jabarkhil, who is in charge 
of the operations unit of the Afghan counternarcotics police. "It's a 
shameful thing."

Police have arrested more than 20 women who have hidden drugs under their 
burqas, Jabarkhil says. The women tape the drugs around their bellies or 
hide them in cooking pots or purses.

The female anti-drug officers now are being sent on raids, where they 
search the women and interrogate them. Eventually they may work undercover, 
where they could pass largely unnoticed under burqas.

"The women can do things that the men can't do," says Ricky Chambers, 
regional program director for the Blackwater Training Center, a division of 
the North Carolina-based Blackwater USA global security company that trains 
the Afghan anti-narcotics police.

Two of the female officers are married, older women who gained police 
experience before the rise of the Taliban. But most are young, in their 
late teens and 20s. Some of those young women stayed in Afghanistan during 
the Taliban's rule. They attended hidden schools, or they wove carpets at 
home, or they just sat. Others fled to Pakistan or Iran.

The younger women were recruited to be police officers from high school or 
by relatives. Two, including Mirakai, were the daughters of police officers.

Several women struggled through training. They complained about the heavy 
guns and intense exercise. A few still speak in whispers, as if they're 
afraid that somebody might hear them.

"In the beginning, it was so hard for me, to be dressed like this, to carry 
a gun," said Sgt. Meena Akrami, 19, in her camouflage. "Before the shooting 
exam, I was about to cry."

She passed, though. Another woman was even named an honors student in her 
class, for her marksmanship and other skills.

The women now speak with conviction of their duty to Afghanistan and to 
stop drugs from ruining it.

Maj. Habiba Sultani, 40, helped find about 150 pounds of marijuana in a 
raid on the outskirts of Kabul. She found guns and ammunition hidden in 
women's storage boxes on another raid in Logar province.

"They didn't want me to search them," Sultani said. "They thought I was a 
man. But I explained to them I was a woman."

Mirakai looks forward to such raids. Her ID card says she's 16; most 
likely, she's older. In Afghanistan, plagued by years of conflict, many 
people do not know their age.

Training draws notice

A recent day of training began with a march through the streets of Kabul. 
Mirakai and Raufi lingered at the rear, keeping in step with the trainer's 
calls of "left, left, left, right, left." They marched over rubble, past 
goats and into a playground, where children stopped to watch. Women in 
burqas, mostly widows, walked by on their way to a literacy class, full of 
thoughts about a country where women can carry guns.

"I'd be very happy to join the police," said Maryam Sima, 50. "But they 
would look at me and say, 'No. You are too old.'"

Mirakai decided she wanted to be a police officer while she was a child, 
watching her father get ready for work. She even tried on his uniform.

Her family moved to Pakistan when the Taliban took over and returned a 
month after the Taliban fled. Last fall her father, Ghulamhazrat Mirakai, 
graduated from the first training course for anti-drug officers.

Now he works for the counternarcotics police and helps with training. His 
neighbors know he is a policeman, but they have no idea what his daughter does.

"We don't want anybody to know she's going to be a police officer," he 
says. "It's still not safe for her."

Ghulamhazrat Mirakai, about 42, rides his bike to work, carrying his 
daughter on the back. She wears a head scarf and the typical long clothes 
of an Afghan woman.

He watches his daughter as she trains. He corrects her mistakes, like when 
Faozia punches with her palms facing up instead of down. "You made a 
mistake again," her father tells her.

"It's so hard," she responds.

But behind her back, he tells strangers how proud he is.

"When I see her in the column of boys, I think she's one of them," he says. 
"She looks tough and strong, like a man."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom