On Monday, as many as 126 teachers, schoolgirls and kindergartners were poisoned at the Habibul Mustafa School in Afghanistan's western Herat province. Herat provincial hospital spokesman Muhammad Rafiq Sherzai revealed some of the victims were vomiting and some were unconscious when they were admitted, but that they were all in stable condition. "A health team has been sent to the area for investigations," he added. Herat police spokesman Abdul Raouf Ahmadi said police have initiated an investigation, but no arrests have been made at this point. And while no group has claimed responsibility for the incident, the Taliban have a despicable track record of targeting school girls. A 2001 State Department report titled "The Taliban's War Against Women" reveals that the "assault on the status of women" began immediately after the group's takeover of Kabul in 1996, following 20 years of civil war. The women's university was closed, nearly every woman was forced to quit her job, access to medical care was restricted, and a restrictive dress code was brutally enforced. As many as 50,000 women who had worked as teachers, doctors, nurses, and clerical workers, because they had lost male relatives and husbands during the long civil war, were reduced to begging on the streets (or worse) to support their families. The Taliban also precipitated a campaign of violence against women that included rape, abduction, and forced marriage.

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