HERAT, Afghanistan – We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.

Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.

Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said. 

But Dr. Mohamed Aref Jalali, the director of the burns unit, said Shirin told him in private that she had set herself on fire deliberately after fighting with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law.

Adrienne Mong/ NBC News

Rezagul set herself on fire to escape her marriage to an abusive and much older husband.

Many girls in Afghanistan think self-immolation is the best solution for family problems, according to Jalali.

“[For these girls], it’s no good to solve the problem with the father-in-law, with the mother-in-law,” said the doctor. ”They think self-immolation will solve the problem.”

It’s a “solution” that appears to a major problem in Afghanistan, particularly among young women between the ages 13 and 25.

In the first seven months of this year, medical staff at the Heart’s burns unit – the only one of its kind in the entire country – said they have seen 51 cases of female self-immolation. Only 13 have survived.   

The practice comes from Iran, where many Afghan refugees had fled to during the decade long war with the Soviet Union (1979-1989) and the era of mujahideen fighting that followed in the 1990s, said Jalali. But its popularity has spread among Afghan women, often from poor, uneducated backgrounds, where the tradition of child or forced marriages runs strong.

“The forced marriage is the best reason and the important reason, and it starts from the economic problem,” said Jalali. 

Often in arranged marriages, women are viewed in very stark terms. 

“She is here only to wash, to clean, to give baby…and nothing more,” said Marie-Jose Brunel, a French volunteer nurse at the burns unit who was full of Gallic warmth and purposeful seriousness. ”If they have no freedom, no possibility to study, to be considered like nothing, it’s very, very difficult.”

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LONDON – It’s a gift they’re sure to treasure.

Customers flocking to Britain’s most prestigious department store, Harrods, this holiday season will now be able to add gold bars to their basket while shopping for the perfect present.  

This latest arrival to hit the shelves comes in a range of sizes, from just over two pounds to 27.5 pounds. There’s also a range of coins on offer, from British sovereigns to South African Krugerrands to American gold eagles.

AFP – Getty Images

A selection of gold ingots and coins for sale in Harrods department store.

With new figures out last week showing Britain’s current recession as the longest on record, the strategy could be a successful one as up-market customers look for somewhere safe to put their money.

Chris Hall, head of Harrods’ bullion department, said the store saw a gap in the market.

 ”Up until now, London has had no well recognized name serving this market,” he said. “Harrods saw the opportunity to help individuals buy physical gold in a prudent manner.” 

But the glittery metal probably won’t be flying off the shelves through the festive season. At today’s market prices, 2.2 pounds of Harrods gold will set you back about ,000. And the top-of-the-line bar, which weighs in at 27.5 pounds, will cost you 9,482.

But Hall said sales had been promising, with several pieces of gold having been snapped up in the week or so it has been on sale.

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The moment of impact when two blasts struck near Iraq’s Ministry of Justice on Sunday, killing at least 147 people, was caught on tape. The twin suicide bombings, the deadliest bomb attacks in Iraq in two years, has sparked questions about Iraq’s security. NBC’s Steve Wende reports from Baghdad.

VIDEO: Bahdad blast momemt of impact…(read more)

BEIJING – Thirty-three years after his death, Mao Zedong is still a god to many in China. And you can see him everywhere.

He’s mostly standing, in a military uniform or a long buttoned-up winter coat, sometimes wearing his symbolic little red-starred army hat, usually waving his right arm high up to the air as if giving a victory gesture or ordering his army to march forward. Occasionally you see him posed as a deep thinker with his hands behind the back, or even sitting on a chair looking into some mysterious future.

VIDEO: Mao, Mao everywhere

He mainly stands in big cities’ center squares, overlooking senior citizens doing tai chi in dawn light or children running around in a park; many times he stands in military barracks or factory blocks, supervising his soldiers in exercise and workers on the assembly line; sometimes he waves his big hand in universities, reminding the students of his renowned remark “you youth are the sun at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., you are the future of the country”; now and then, he makes surprise appearances in a dingy local clinic, a small Sichuan restaurant, or in the middle of a rundown low-rise housing complex.

He’s mostly cement, gray and stiff, sometimes marble, white and spotless, occasionally bronze, yellow and shining.

There are hundreds of these statues of the late founder of the People’s Republic of China across the country. And Cheng Wenjun, an urban sculpture designer and photographer, made it his mission, which he began in 1997, to make a record of every one.

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KAKUMA, Northern Kenya – They shuffle aimlessly in the dust: 50,000 refugees crammed into thousands of huts made from branches, leaves, mud and plastic in the Kakuma camp in Northern Kenya.

Natives of Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the refugees have fled wars aggravated by drought, yet even here the supply of water is sporadic. They eat once a day from supplies provided by aid agencies. Kakuma is one of the oldest and largest refugee camps in the world and some people have been here since 1991 when it was established.

They don’t like to talk to strangers about their problems, but the roads are lined by placards, erected by aid agencies, with slogans and exhortations that are like windows into the refugees’ pain.

The most graphic reads: “STOP FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION – IT IS A HEALTH HAZARD (RISK).” The signs are in English, Kenya’s official language, but since the camp’s residents speak a wide variety of regional and native languages, the words are incomprehensible to most refugees.

However anyone can get the message from the disturbing illustration of a woman kneeling with a razor while a mother offers up her infant girl. Female genital mutilation is almost universal in Somalia and common in neighboring countries.

Martin Fletcher / NBC News

A poster in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee telling people to “STOP FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION IT IS A HEALTH HAZARD (RISK).”

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