KABUL, Afghanistan – Mohammad Hassan believed that his daughter had died. Five-year-old Fawzia was lying in the sand and didn’t move. She was bleeding heavily from what was left of her private parts. Mohammad could only stare at her, frozen in awe.

Five minutes earlier, he had been at the back of his house chopping wood when a child came running up to him. “They’ve kidnapped her!” the child yelled. “The man with the white scarf has taken her!” That man with a white scarf had come to the playground where Fawzia frolicked, punched her in the face and taken her to a garden.

There, he raped her.

“These crimes are common in Afghanistan,” says Sajeda of RAWA, an organization that fights for women’s rights.

RAWA is not an illegal organization, but it has to work underground because religious extremists and the political atmosphere pose a threat to the safety of its members, Sajeda explains.

She looks like so many Afghan women, wearing a long coat and a headscarf. But what she does is still uncommon in this male-dominated Islamic state – she struggles against the horrors that await many women unfortunate enough to have been born in this country.

“Every day, women and children are physically abused and raped with impunity,” she says. “Warlords kidnap children to be raped. Together with the religious extremists, they force the men to keep their women inside and abuse them.”

Fawzia was not dead, she was unconscious, and was taken to a hospital. “All the nurses cried when they saw her,” says her father Mohammad. The girl went into surgery where doctors attempted to repair the damage to her sexual organs. She stayed three nights and four days before returning home, and still has to see doctors regularly for check-ups.

Every 10 minutes she runs to the bathroom, unable to hold her urine. She seems happy, playing with her doll and then the NewsMax still camera, but that’s only during the day. “Every night she wakes up screaming. She has nightmares about the rape,” her father tells me.

The need for RAWA’s work is supported by facts and figures provided by UNICEF. According to that organization, Afghanistan has the fourth worst record in under-five child mortality, the infant mortality rate being 152 per 1,000 live births. About 600 children under the age of five die every day.

Only half of the primary school-age children attend classes. But even in school they’re not safe: Religious extremists regularly attack schools where girls are educated and kill teachers.

Surviving school is not the end of many girls’ ordeal. One third of all women are married before the age of 18 – and more often than not these are forced marriages.

Hard figures about rape and child sex abuse are difficult to come by, but women activists like Sajeda of RAWA and legislator Malalai Joya say the hundreds of cases reported to them are just the tip of the iceberg.

While NewsMax talked with Fawzia’s parents, an 11-year-old girl was raped by Northern Alliance warlords in Kondoz province. In the bazaar in Kabul, DVD’s can be bought showing young boys being paraded at warlord sex orgies.

Fawzia’s rapist has been caught by the police and is currently in custody, but it is uncertain if he will remain there. His brothers and friends have already threatened Fawzia’s parents, saying they’ve committed rapes many other times.

They will no doubt try to take advantage of the thoroughly corrupt judicial system to get the man out, says Mohammad.

His only hope is that since the case occurred in the capital, it gained more media attention than cases in the provinces usually receive. After a dramatic appeal on TV to president Hamid Karzai – “we voted for you to protect us” – Mohammad and his wife were invited to the presidential palace, where Karzai promised them his support and vowed to pay for Fawzia’s treatment.

“But he hasn’t paid anything and we think it has only been a publicity stunt for him,” Mohammad complains.

Says Sajeda of RAWA: “Karzai needs to deal with fundamentalists to stay in power. We believe he is an educated man but we also believe he is alone. He doesn’t want to alienate the fundamentalist Mujahideen. He is surrounded by criminals and warlords who are against human rights and women’s rights.”

RAWA runs a number of literacy and other empowerment projects for women throughout Afghanistan, but they can’t count on the government to protect them. “When we do public projects, the International NATO forces sometimes protect us,” says Sajeda.

For girls like Fawzia, surviving savage rape will in many cases force them to face new dangers in their young lives. The hospital report states that the family should be monitored and the police already warned the parents not to hurt their daughter. This may seem incomprehensible to the Western reader, but in Islamic societies like Afghanistan a daughter who is raped or loses her virginity brings shame on the whole family.

The lost honor can then only be recovered by killing the victim – the so-called “honor killings” that frequently occur in Afghanistan. The matter of honor is a big issue for Mohammad too. “I keep thinking about how to remove this shame from our family and restore our honor,” he says, “but I am poor and this is impossible to do.”

This article was published earlier at NewsMax.