When the order came to evacuate the Totia high school, hundreds of girls ran from their desks clutching handkerchiefs and their headscarves over their mouths. School bags were abandoned as some leapt out of the ground floor windows of their dilapidated two-story school block rather than trying to push their way through a melee of teenage girls all rushing to get out to fresh air.
Teachers tried to organize an orderly departure, but their efforts were in vain amid rising panic that the school had become the latest in Afghanistan to be hit by an apparent poison gas attack.
A total of 46 students and nine teachers were treated in hospital after what Mohammad Asif Nang, an official at the education ministry, described as “an apparent poisoning” attack by “the enemies of women’s education.”
According to staff, parents and onlookers, girls began fainting in the school’s main classroom block at about 10:30am on Wednesday, during the first of three daily shifts designed to triple the number of girls at the school.
Some victims had to be carried out, while others stumbled to the school gates, where about 18 slumped to the ground unconscious, said Abdul Haq, a 15-year-old boy who witnessed the incident.
Many were taken to hospital and most quickly recovered, but some girls remained unconscious for several hours, doctors said. Others were vomiting and complaining of nausea.
The symptoms matched those of other cases reported around the country. Opinions are divided between those who denounce the incidents as malicious attacks by social conservatives who disapprove of female education and skeptics who think the culprit is more likely to be mass hysteria.
At the Boost hospital, the head doctor, Abdullah Abid, said four of the 22 girls admitted remained unconscious for at least two hours.
He said that after studying psychiatry for a year in Pakistan he had become acutely aware of the power of hysteria and its ability to cause physiological responses, but he did not think that was the cause of the latest incident.
“I think three of them were just suffering from shock from seeing their friends become ill. But something else must have happened to the others,” he said.
Education ministry officials said five similar cases had been dealt with in Kabul this year alone and 11 more around the country.
The Taliban banned girls’ education when it was in power from 1996 to 2001 and it continues to target women and girls’ schools in the areas they control.
One of its intimidation techniques is the so-called “night letters” dropped off at homes and schools. In one case in a northern province in February a letter, which was handed to Human Rights Watch, said the school was misleading “pure and innocent girls.”
With Taliban violence surging across the country, the fear of insurgent attacks is becoming a bigger concern for ordinary Afghans.
The existence of such fears can trigger mass hysteria accompanied by actual physical illness, experts say.
Lal Mohammad, Totia school’s caretaker, said nothing untoward had been found so far. The only thing unusual was a nauseating smell, apparently similar to that of human sewage, which greeted the students when they arrived in the morning.
“It was so bad that the head said we must tell the neighboring houses that they should only clear out their shit at the night time,” Mohammad said.
Western medical experts have taken blood samples from alleged victims while investigating previous incidents, but have been unable to find clear evidence of poisoning. They have also questioned how such an apparently powerful gas could be spread with such apparent ease round large school buildings.
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