Azra Jafari
Azra Jafari is an Afghan politician and women rights advocate who became the first female mayor in Afghanistan appointed by President Hamid Karzai in December 2008. She became the mayor of Nili, a town in Daykundi Province of Afghanistan. She belongs to the Hazara ethnic group.
Jafari has lived in the United States since 2014.
Personal life
Jafari was born into a Hazara family. She grew up in Ghor Province. During the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, Jafari fled to Iran as a refugee, where she completed high school and subsequently ran a school for refugee children.She has a daughter, born in the early 2000s. She is a Shia Muslim.
Career
Azra Jafari was editor-in-chief of Afghan social and cultural magazine Farhang in 1998. Later, she established an elementary school for Afghan refugees in Iran while she was working as Officer in Charge in Refugees' Cultural Center.After the removal of the Taliban in late 2001 and the establishment of the new western-backed Karzai administration, she returned and participated in the 2002 loya jirga in Kabul.
She continued her education at Midwifery school in Kabul 2005.
In December 2008, she was appointed as the first and till then the only female mayor in Afghanistan. She was appointed as the mayor of the town of Nili. As mayor, Jafari faced a lack of infrastructure. She regularly traveled to Kabul to request government funds.
Since 2014, Jafari has lived in Maryland, United States, having fled Afghanistan following threats from the Taliban.