Afghanistan

Saira Shakeeb Sadat wants her district, Khwaja Dukoh, to change. Surrounded by mud walls, the dusty hamlet in the remote northern Afghan province of Jawzjan is home to about 5,000 families. The isolation means security is good here, but little aid has reached the town.

But Sadat wants to make a difference, and now she has her chance: last month she was appointed Afghanistan's first female district governor.

Afghan women and girls are increasingly victims of violence with a 20 percent increase last year in the number killed or injured even though the number of civilian casualties fell for the first time in years, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Democratic Senator Bob Casey and a handful of other senators met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington, D.C., to discuss the upcoming 2014 election and women's rights in the war-laden country.

Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and a handful of other senators met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington, D.C., to discuss the upcoming 2014 election and women's rights in the war-laden country.

A new report released by the UN says Afghan women are still victims of abuse despite some success by authorities in prosecuting cases of rape, forced marriages and domestic violence.

The UN collected information from 22 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces over a 12-month period ending in September to find out how existing laws protecting women were being implemented.

Mohammad Ishaq Aloko told TOLOnews that because most women in the remote areas of the country do not have access to or in some cases do not even know of the judicial bodies, many incidents are never reported.

"You see that women in the provinces such as Badghis and Daikondi don't know at all where the judiciary organisations are and what they do," he said in an interview Thursday.

The Department for International Development (DFID) must do more to improve the lives of women in Afghanistan who continue to suffer discrimination and abuse, MPs have demanded today.

Chairman of the International Development Committee, Rt Hon Sir Malcolm Bruce MP, said:

The decade-long war in Afghanistan has been the focus of countless books and exhibitions, but there is one view of the conflict that has not been described well – until now.

Afghan women's safety activists say a new partnership with religious leaders can help stop Taliban attacks on girls and women that have left a Pakistani teen activist for girls just across the border in Swat Province undergoing brain surgery after a gunshot execution.

In the latest incident, an 18-year-old identified only as Najibullah was arrested on October 13 in connection with the gruesome torture and beheading two days earlier of a woman in the western city of Herat, near the border with Iran.

Mahgul, a 25-year-old newlywed, was found dead outside her home by her family, who then carried her mutilated body to the local Department for Women's Affairs to raise awareness of her killing.