Unbowed by Attack, Afghan Girls Return to School

Last November in Kandahar, the southern Afghan city in the grip of the Taliban, 15 students and teachers were sprayed with acid on their way to a girls' school. The attack was the culmination of a Taliban-supported campaign to keep women from education, but the girls and their teachers have returned—to a bustling school of 1,300 students, reports Dexter Filkins in the New York Times.

The Japanese-built girls' school in Kandahar "appears to have set off something of a social revolution," Filkins writes. While under Taliban rule Afghan girls were forbidden from attending school, now education for women is so popular that students have to gather in UNICEF tents outside the building. "If you don’t send your daughters to school, then the enemy wins," says the school's principal.
(More Afghanistan stories.)