Yelda Mahmoud, 21, fled Kandahar after constant death threats from the Taliban.
It was an ordinary morning, or as ordinary as a morning can be in southern Afghanistan, but it was the day that decided the future for Yelda Mahmood.
Five weeks ago, she walked into her office in a government agency in Kandahar to a tumult of screams and sobs. Yet another of her colleagues, the third in four months, had been killed on the way to work by a Taliban gunman on a motorcycle.
"It was a girl, younger than me," said Ms. Mahmood, who is 21. "Her name was Nadeem."
That night, Ms. Mahmood got another of the anonymous calls that had become chillingly frequent.
"We killed Nadeem," a man on the other end said, "and we will kill you and all of your co-workers."
The next day, Ms. Mahmood's parents made the decision they had dreaded but expected for months. They packed up their clothes, mementos and the two fluffy stuffed animals that always sat on the living room couch and fled Kandahar for the relative safety of Kabul, another family of ordinary Afghans whose daily dance with violent death has spun them away from their dreams.
Ms. Mahmood was a star pupil at the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar, where young women study English, business management and other subjects, before joining an Afghan government agency that helps women apply for business-development loans.
Those pursuits made her a marked woman.
For the past two years, the Taliban has waged a steady campaign of assassinations of Afghans working either for their own government or for foreigners. Kandahar, the centre of Canadian combat and aid operations until this summer, is the murder capital of a murder-ridden country.
The Afghan-American mayor was killed by a suicide bomber this summer. The half-brother of President Hamid Karzai was murdered in May. A string of other Taliban attacks killed the police chief, the deputy mayor, pro-government religious leaders, tribal elders, district governors and uncounted other people.
Ms. Mahmood described the precautions she and her family took in Kandahar.
They lived in a gated and guarded compound of new single-family homes called Aino Mina, a suburban-style development built in more optimistic times to cater to the new middle-class earning money from jobs with foreign aid groups and NATO.
Her mother, who taught at a school on the compound, got calls warning her not to let her daughters out of the house. Ms. Mahmood's siblings never left Aino Mina.
Her father, Zargai Mahmood, owned a small logistics company with his brother-in-law that had contracts with NATO's sprawling Kandahar Airfield. But he worked from home. On the one day a week he went into the city to go to the bank, he donned a dirty tunic and turban so as not to appear that he was anything more than a poor villager.
Then one day last summer, soon after President Barack Obama announced that American troops would start withdrawing this year and Canadian troops pulled out of Kandahar, a security guard at Aino Mino murmured something to Mr. Mahmood. The day the foreigners leave Afghanistan, the guard said, I will kill you and take your house.
Mr. Mahmood was in anguish about what to do. Even if he sold his house, where would he move the family and how would he make a living? If he forbade his children from leaving the house, as his stalkers demanded, he would kill their dreams. "What kind of life is that – to never work or study or use their potential?" he said.
His decision was made when his daughter's co-worker was murdered. It was cemented just 24 hours later, when she learned that a man she used to work with at the USAID project had been shot and killed by a masked assassin.
In Kabul, the family squeezed into a rented apartment, but their lives have expanded.
Ms. Mahmood has been promised a job at the same ministry where she worked in Kandahar and applies for scholarships to universities in Canada in her spare time. Her sister, who had to shelve her dream of university in Kandahar, just started studying engineering. Her mother goes wherever she likes and has put away her burka.
Mr. Mahmood is not working, but he has allowed himself some small measure of hope.
"Here, we're not completely relaxed because there are still dangers," he said. "But … we're 50 per cent safer than there. And here, for now, my children can have a chance to be what they want to be."