Afghanistan: A year of violence on the road to peace

A year ago this week, the Taliban signed a deal with the United States designed, in theory, to pave the road to peace in Afghanistan. It committed the Taliban to preventing attacks on US forces and the US to withdrawing its remaining troops from the country. It did not commit the Taliban to a ceasefire with respect to Afghanistan's government, or its citizens.

One Sunday morning last month, Qadria Yasini got ready as usual for work. She put on a new coat and woke her son Wali to say that she had left some money for food. Her driver wound through the Kabul neighbourhood on the way to the office, stopping to collect Yasini's friend and fellow Supreme Court judge, Zakia Herawi.

Yasini, who was 53, and Herawi, who was 47, were two of Afghanistan's roughly 250 female judges - a number which has risen steadily from zero under the Taliban two decades ago and amounts to about 14% of the country's total. The two women were not high-profile politicians; they were not military figures. Neither had ever received a warning from the Taliban, as many journalists and activists have. They were not accustomed to taking day-to-day security precautions. Yasini had recently turned down a government offer of a pistol, her family said. She didn't think she needed it.

In the end, the pistol probably would not have saved her. The assassins knew where the two judges would be. They knew the car, the route. There were three of them. When they prized open the door, Yasini clutched her handbag to her chest and the five bullets that hit her passed through it, piercing her purse, her books, and a handwritten Mother's Day card from her sons that she had carried with her for the best part of a year. "She told us once that she looked at our card every day," her son Wali said.