Poison gas targeted Afghan girls’ schools

The admission was made in an interview, as a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health was answering questions about two new episodes in the past week. The spokesman, Dr. Kargar Norughli, said his ministry and the World Health Organization had been testing the blood of victims in 10 mass sickenings and had confirmed the presence of toxic but not fatal levels of organophosphates. Those compounds are widely used in insecticides and herbicides, and they are also the active ingredients of compounds developed in the past as chemical weapons, including sarin and VX gas.

Norughli did not explain why the confirmations had not been announced earlier.

But he emphasized that how the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery. There have been no fatalities, and no one has claimed responsibility for the episodes.

Many local officials had dismissed the cases as hysteria provoked by acid and arson attacks on schoolgirls by Taliban fighters and others who objected to their education. But the cases have been reported only in girls’ schools or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.

The blood samples taken in the past week from victims in the two new cases — 119 girls and four teachers at two schools in Kabul — are still being analyzed, Norughli said, but their symptoms were similar to those in the 10 cases where the poisonings were confirmed.

At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, students at Zabihullah Esmati High School in the Kart-e-Naw area of Kabul alerted their deputy principal, Tela Mohammed Ameri, to a strong, sweet smell in one of the classrooms.

Soon the odor turned foul, and several girls began complaining of headaches and sore throats, both in that classroom and an adjacent one. Within minutes, they began fainting. Ameri ordered the school evacuated.

Many of the girls fainted as they tried to flee — in the hallways, in the courtyard outside, and even half an hour later as they walked home. A few reported that they passed out at home hours later.

Attacks on schools in Afghanistan, particularly girls’ schools, have been rife in recent years, with most of them carried out by insurgents. A spokesman for the Ministry of Education, Gul Agha Ahmadi, said 60 schools had been burned down or destroyed so far this year. Cases where acid is thrown on female students are frequent in the south and occasionally even in Kabul.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, reached by phone, said the insurgents oppose some girls’ education but would not resort to gas attacks.

“We have not and will never take such action against innocent girls,’’ he said.

Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai’s recent complaints that international forces should focus on militant leaders hiding in neighboring Pakistan instead of Afghan villages doesn’t mean the government no longer supports the US war strategy, the top NATO commander said yesterday.

General David Petraeus said he shares Karzai’s concern about threats across the border in Pakistan but said the Pakistanis deserve credit for waging what he described as an “impressive counterinsurgency campaign’’ during the past 18 months.

The Karzai government has been increasingly vocal in recent days about the need to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Twenty-two American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan over the past five days, a sudden end-of-August bloodletting that follows record-high death tolls for US troops in June and July.

Five of the troops were slain yesterday, including four killed by two improvised explosive devices in the east and one during an insurgent attack in the south, according to the International Security Assistance Force.

The deaths brought the number of American troops killed during August to 55, according to a count from the Associated Press. The number compares with 66 Americans slain last month and 60 in June. Roadside bombs planted along military routes have been responsible for most of the deaths, as international forces penetrate deeper into areas controlled by Taliban insurgents.

In Kabul, gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying employees of the Afghan Supreme Court, killing three and wounding several others, officials said.

Speaking yesterday in Milwaukee, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates argued that after years of neglect the United States had finally devoted the necessary resources to the Afghan conflict.

“With the invasion of Iraq our attention — and resources — were diverted,’’ Gates told an audience at the American Legion in Milwaukee. “Afghanistan became a second-tier priority.’’

Material from The Washington Post and the Associated Press was used in this report.