Afghan women step up with guns and headscarves

An Afghan policewoman at a training programme in Herat . For the handful of women police in one of Afghanistan\'s most volatile provinces, danger and disapproval are all in a day\'s work. Not that it bothers them.\"I\'m police -- police should not be scared of anything,\" one of them, Carmela, told AFP. \"I\'m doing my job like a man.\"
There are just 16 women police out of a total force of several thousand in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. Across the war-torn country, the total is around 1,200 out of 126,000, or roughly one percent.
They mainly work at checkpoints, searching other women for weapons, suicide vests or any other signs of insurgent activity, although some have even lower grade jobs such as cleaning buildings at police headquarters.
While on duty, most of them cover their faces and wear sunglasses to avoid being recognised. All have had to secure permission from their families to join the force.
Police in Helmand are frequently targeted by the Taliban and other insurgents, who know that police will take on an increasing role in the run-up to the transition to Afghan control of security in 2014.

A parking lot containing bombed-out patrol vehicles outside police headquarters in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, where AFP met the women, is a constant reminder of the dangers they face.
Carmela, 37, said she joined up to support her family after her husband, a policeman, was killed by the Taliban.
She insisted she was not afraid of the same fate, but said her greatest ambition in policing was to be able to carry a gun.
\"One of my favourite subjects in policing is firearms -- when I have a pistol and fire it, it feels good,\" she said, dressed in a dark green thigh-length tunic with a badge showing the Afghan flag on one arm and the police insignia on the other.
While most members of her family are happy with her job, which comes with a relatively good salary of around $350 a month, she said her father-in-law was \"not happy\" but could not say why.
Such attitudes are common, particularly in areas such as Helmand which are desperately poor and where many people are poorly educated.
Just 32 percent of people in southwest Afghanistan support the idea of women police officers in the community, according to a UN Development Programme (UNDP) survey released in January, though figures tend to be higher in urban areas.
Another of Helmand\'s female police, 23-year-old Aziza, said she did not even tell her parents when she joined, although her husband knew.
\"Parents are always thinking about their children, that\'s why they were not happy for me to do this kind of job, particularly in Helmand,\" she said, giving only one name like all of the women interviewed.
\"But I\'m still happy to do this job.\"

Like the others, Aziza said she had never been threatened on the job but had received abuse for what she did.
\"I haven\'t seen any threat but one day when I was searching, a lady asked me \'why are you searching? How much pay do you get?\' She was saying some abusive things,\" she said.
A third policewoman, Malalai, with a world-weary face, said she had worked for the force for many years.
After the Taliban took power in 1996, she was forced to leave the police but came back. She now works in recruitment and has earned a higher position than the others, which even gives her the right to carry a gun.
Asked what qualities were needed to succeed as a woman police officer in Afghanistan, she said: \"To be brave and know about the politics and have good physical qualities.\"
Melanie Hooper, a British defence ministry police officer who is mentoring the women, said she was battling to get them deployed on more operations and working on domestic violence.
But she said senior Afghan male police thought this \"won\'t be well received\" in such a conservative society, adding that progress on the kind of work they can do would have to come in \"baby steps.\"
Mohammad Rafiq Sheryar, the chief of Helmand?s police training academy, said the province was planning to recruit more women but cited a lack of dormitory accommodation at the centre as a hindrance.
While Hooper said that she did not know of many attempts to intimidate female police in Helmand out of their job, she qualified this by saying: \"A lot of people don\'t know they exist, which is the saving grace.\"