Survivor of gun violence in Afghanistan says she wants to be ‘voice of women’
VANCOUVER — When Shakila Zareen looked in the mirror for the first time after her worst attack, she didn’t recognize herself.
A bullet from a rifle she said was fired by her husband shattered her cheek bone, collapsed her eye socket and took half her nose with it.
“I realized I’m not the person I used to be and I was really frightened,” she said in an interview through a Dari interpreter. “I cried and cried, thinking, how did all of this happen to me?”
Zareen, who moved to Canada as a refugee from Afghanistan in January, spoke from a couch in her Vancouver-area apartment where she lives with her sister and mother.