The Question of Afghanistan

Sima Samar was born in Jaghori, Ghazni, Afghanistan, on 4 February 1957. She obtained her degree in medicine in February 1982 from Kabul University, the first Hazara woman to do so. After living in refuge for over a decade, Samar returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to assume a cabinet post in the Afghan Transitional Administration led by Hamid Karzai. In the interim government, she served as Deputy President and then as Minister for Women's Affairs. She was forced into resignation from her post after she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning conservative Islamic laws, especiallysharia law, during an interview in Canada with a Persian-language newspaper. She currently heads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).