Bride of man accused in rampage waits in Kabul

Since 09-06-06

By Lisa Fernandez and Julia Prodis-SulekMEDIANEWS
Inside Bay Area

09/04/2006

http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/localnews/ci_4285204

In the photograph splashed across newspapers and TV screens, the bride has a hint of a smile as she tilts her sparkling tiara gently toward her new husband. Her dark hair is piled high and her wedding veil cascades over her shoulders.

This is the only image we in the Bay Area have of Nahid Popal, the wife by arranged marriage to a man she hardly knows, who allegedly plowed through as many as 18 people, killing one, on the streets of Fremont and San Francisco last week.

Less than a month after her wedding, she remains in her hometown of Kabul, halfway around the world from her new husband, Omeed Aziz Popal, 29, of Fremont, who sits in a psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital.

Nahid Popal's world, her feelings, her future, are a mystery to the Afghan community in the Bay Area — thelargest concentration of such immigrants in the United States.

But many are taking her side. Some are even offering advice and comfort from afar.

So what happens to her now?

"She is a victim," said Seema Farhad, who left Afghanistan in 1980, and works as a women's support coordinator and domestic violence specialist at the Afghan Coalition in Fremont, "I feel so bad for her, as a woman."

The Popal case is so exceptional that the bride will probably be able to annul her marriage if she wishes — free of shame — said Farid Younos of Bay Point, a cultural anthropologist and marital counselor to Afghan families.

It's not clear what Nahid Popal knew about her husband's reported mental illness.

His cousin, Hamid Nekrawesh, told the Mercury News that Popal was plagued by bad dreams and thoughts of the devil coming after him.

The marriage was arranged by the couple's families and the two had never met before the summer wedding in Kabul.

Arranged marriages are customary in many non-Western cultures, even for many Americanized immigrants who retain traditions of courtship, community members say.

As many interpret the laws of Islam, the faith forbids forced marriages where either partner is against it.

Arranged marriages, they say, help the entire family buy into the relationship. In Afghan culture, particularly, it's common for cousins, who know each other from birth, to marry.

Hashmat Ansari, director of Pamir Travel in Fremont, said sometimes as many as "two people a day" book flights to Afghanistan on their way to bring an "Afghan girl home." He booked one of those flights for Popal and his family for his wedding trip. A mechanic, Popal seemed calm and quiet, Ansari said, while his mother, Zakia, did all the talking in Farsi.

But after he returned in mid-August, Popal's cousin said Popal was desperate to go back to Kabul to wait with his wife for her immigration to be approved, which could take six months to a year. The cousin said Popal led a sheltered life and longed to leave his parents' home.

His parents reportedly didn't want him to go to Kabul and the family had a series of arguments before the alleged rampage.

Though she wouldn't talk about the Popal case, Marie Sebrechts of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said a spouse's criminal case should not hurt someone's chances to immigrate. Consideration, she said, is given to the moral character of the person seeking the visa and the validity of the marriage.

Little information could be found about Nahid Popal or her family and her future could be uncertain.

Afghanistan is now free from the harsh Taliban rule. And it's a place where women now may shed their burquas and enter the workplace or study at universities.

But it is still a patriarchal society, and in many instances, still very anti-woman, said Younos. Divorce, he said, often carries a stigma for women.

It's traditional for men to initiate divorce in the predominantly Muslim country, but spiritual leaders, called imams, have granted women the right to file for divorce in specific cases.

As some see it, if Nahid Popal's husband is, in fact, mentally ill, she wouldn't be required by Islamic law to live with him, Younos said.

"The law is very clear," he said. "I don't think she'll be stigmatized. She was not disloyal. She is a total innocent lady."

Wahida Noorzad, an Afghan-American family law attorney in Pleasanton, said she doesn't believe the matter is so clear cut. Unfortunately, she said, the bride will be looked down upon by many traditional-minded men, both in Afghanistan and the West, if she consummated the marriage. However, Noorzad said younger, more modern, men likely won't mind.

"But the poor girl is just so unlucky," Noorzad said. "The bigger problem is that she will be stereotyped by ignorant people. They might think that she's simply bad luck."

As Meryem Katibi of San Ramon, an activist with Afghan Friends Network sees it, the new bride should come to the United States and start a new life — without Popal.

Once she arrives, Katibi suggested, she could divorce him and, as is often customary, marry Popal's younger brother or another bachelor in the family.

"She can get a job here, and education," Katibi said. "No one will blame her for what her husband did."

Contact Lisa Fernandez at lfernandez(at)mercurynews.com or (510) 790-7313.