When Hossai, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan aid worker in the southern city of Kandahar, received threatening phone calls from a man who said he was with the Taliban, she didn’t believe it. Or she chose to carry on regardless. The man had told her to stop working with foreigners. But Hossai didn’t want to give up a good job with an American development company, Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI). Within weeks Hossai was dead. On April 13, 2010, a gunman lay in wait for her. When she left the office, he shot her multiple times. She died the next day.

Days after Hossai’s killing, another young woman working in Kandahar, Nadia N. received a letter that appeared to be from Taliban members or sympathizers, which threatened her with death:

Nadia N. did believe the letter, and quit her job. Such “night letters,” usually posted or pinned to doors at night, are a common form of Taliban intimidation. Often a letter is enough to scare women or men into compliance. Nadia N. reported the threat to the government, but expected nothing: “What can they do?”

The UN estimates that 462 Afghan civilians were assassinated in 2010, an increase of more than 100 percent over 2009. More than half of those killed were in the southern region where Nadia N. and her family lived. While the number of women among those killed represent only a fraction of the total number of assassinations, it is of high symbolic importance in a country where women represented only 36 percent of the labor force in 2010 as reported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and rarely occupy high-ranking positions. The threats and killings send a chilling message to those women who want to take an active role in their society.

Nadia N. had worked for an international NGO that supports children in need.