KANDAHAR: With a mixture of pride and confusion, women in this stronghold of the Taliban regime that barred them from public life were determined to vote in Sunday’s landmark elections. Crowding women-only voting stations in greater numbers than in the presidential election in October, the burqa-clad voters stumbled through an unfamiliar process denied to them by decades of war and Taliban rule.

“Could someone help me?” asked Mastora, 50, holding up two complicated, newspaper-sized ballot papers crammed with tiny photographs of hundreds of candidates, a look of desperation on her face.

No one heard and eventually she marked only one of the two ballots, with separate papers for the national assembly and the provincial councils.

“Yes, it is important... but I do not know what I am voting for,” she admitted. “And stop your questions, my head is already bursting with all of this.”

In southern Afghanistan’s biggest city, most women are illiterate.

Taliban-linked militants threatened to disrupt Sunday’s vote, the latest step in the war-ravaged country’s transition to democracy launched after the hardliners were toppled in a US-led campaign in late 2001.

Nine people were killed as polling started, including a French soldier and an Afghan civilian hit by a US air strike, but a feared massive attack did not materialize.

The Taliban’s threats did not keep women away from the landmark vote that many hoped would put the war-shattered country on the path to peace and development.

“I was afraid to come,” said 38-year-old Lailoma, who was running a voting centre in a school in the ramshackle city.

“The rebels said they will attack those who take part in the election. They threatened to kill me. But I will sacrifice my life for the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” she said.

“It is time that Afghans wake up and start respecting their rights through these democratic elections,” said Khadija, 45, as she emerged from a polling booth with her teenage daughter.

“In my time we were asleep,” she said. “This is a great opportunity for the next generation.”

One of the city’s candidates, Shahida Hussein, was ecstatic with the turnout of women.

“I am so happy to see all these women coming out of their homes to vote,” she said. “At the entrance candidates were trying to tell them to vote for them but the women said, ‘It’s my choice’,” she added with pride.

In Kandahar 67,000 more women signed up to vote in Sunday’s poll than in the presidential election last year, officials said. Nationally 44 per cent of the electorate were women compared to 41 per cent in the last vote.

Around 10 per cent of the candidates nationwide are women, election officials said.

About a quarter of the seats on the 249-seat parliament chosen Sunday were reserved for women, as were at least two seats on each of the 34 provincial councils.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, one of the polling stations reserved for women was in the Sultan Razia girl’s high school — where nearly 1,000 Taliban fighters and their Al Qaeda-linked allies took shelter in 2001 in the dying days of the resistance to US-led and Afghan forces.

Casting her vote, teacher Fahima said: “I vote for the future of my country. I hope the old times never come back.”

—AFP