After the investigation Ismail Khan was persuaded to turn over the women, now officially classed as "returnees," to UNHCR. The UN agency, which does not provide hands-on care, consigned them to Shuhada, an Afghan nongovernmental organization fronted by Dr. Sima Samar, Afghanistan's best-known champion of women's rights. Dr. Samar, a physician, was Afghanistan's first Minister of Women's Affairs and now heads the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. She quickly established a "shelter" for the women in Kabul, promising them literacy and vocational training.

But in Kabul things got worse fast. Though none were charged with wrongdoing, the women were again locked up--this time in smaller quarters, and again with male guards. The promised vocational training turned out to be carpet weaving, a grueling profit-making venture meant to defray the cost of keeping them. The women refused to do it. They began to act out. They made themselves up. They dressed provocatively. They played loud music. They danced.

UNHCR called in Medica Mondiale, a German NGO experienced--in Bosnia, Kosova, Albania--in helping women doubly victimized by war and male violence. Their psychologists and doctors diagnosed the women as deeply traumatized by physical and sexual violence, and by great loss--the loss of home and family and in some cases children they'd had to leave behind. But according to Sylvia Johnson, a German psychologist who spent many hours at the "shelter" over a period of months, most of the girls were not depressed. They were angry at being locked up.

"They were defiant," Johnson says, "like a gang of street kids--but not aggressive, not malicious. They were a bunch of young girls who drew their fantasies from Indian Bollywood movies. They wanted to be film stars. They had spirit. They were survivors."

A few managed to escape, although Kabul police later caught two of them walking "unaccompanied" and sent them to prison. At least one, with her young daughter, was sent to a mental asylum, where she spends the days obsessively scrubbing the child's genitalia. Desperate to get rid of the rest, Dr. Samar shipped half a dozen of the brightest girls to a Shuhada-sponsored clinic in the central mountains, ostensibly to train as nurses. And then last spring she offered the remaining girls up for marriage. That is, she let it be known that women were available, and men from the neighborhood began to stop by to inquire. When a match was made, Dr. Samar would ask the prospective bride for her consent. She could agree to the match or stay locked up. Only two women refused to marry.

Unlike most Afghan brides, these women were handed over for free. That put them within reach of men who couldn't afford or expect much. One reportedly married a relative of a Shuhada cleaning woman.

An Afghan representative of UNHCR, Kabul, praised the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission for coming up with such a creative solution to the otherwise insoluble problem of independent women. Dr. Samar herself maintains that she did the women a big favor by vouching for them and restoring them to a legitimate place in Afghan society. "It was only my recommendation that got them husbands," she says. "And what else could we do? We couldn't keep them forever." She asks the question rhetorically, as if one couldn't possibly think of another thing--and as if she'd had some legal right to keep them at all.

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