Roya Shams was just gaining strength from Canadian donors in her struggle against the Taliban when they killed the schoolgirl’s biggest ally, a father who died defending her right to learn.

Just 17 years old, she is devastated by the loss of the man who inspired her to fight to make life better for Afghan girls and women.

He always taught Roya that she must never give in to intimidation. So as she cries, she refuses to bow down.

Despite more death threats, Roya is trying to find a safe way back to school.

She is determined to honour the man who preferred death over surrender, and the faith of Toronto Star readers who donated thousands of dollars to back her courageous stand for education.

“My father always told me to choose ‘country or coffin,’ ” she said. “I like this quote very much and I will obey his way in my life. I am proud of his martyrdom. I’ll never be timid because of his death. He died for his country and people.”

Roya’s father, Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, was a colonel in charge of a district police substation in Kandahar city.

He signed up as cop when he was 18, and spent most of the rest of his 57 years serving one Afghan government or another, no matter the risks. And they were constant.

Unlike millions of other Afghans who fled the country for safe haven in one phase or another of more than three decades of endless war, Haji Sayed held his ground.

He was wounded two or three times, but never considered giving up. He kept coming back for more, certain that when God willed it to be so, right would triumph over wrong.

This summer, intelligence operatives picked up the trail of an important local Taliban commander named Mullah Qahar, along with reports of an insurgent ammunition depot, in Kandahar’s Gargai neighbourhood, near Mirwais Hospital.

Qahar was suspected of sending suicide bombers and assassination teams from his lair. Roya’s father had been hunting him a long time.

He led police on a 2 a.m. operation to capture Qahar and his arms dump on July 20. Roya called his cellphone at 6:30 that morning to tell him his breakfast was waiting at home.

“He told me that the operation was over and he would come soon,” Roya recalled. “Later, as the security forces were about to abandon the area, they came under fire from one of the seized houses.

“So they tried to search the house where the shooting came from.”

When the police search party entered, an insurgent tossed a hand grenade. As smoke and dust from the blast swirled, the compound erupted in a fierce firefight.

Qahar shot Roya’s father, she said. By 10 a.m., the security forces killed Qahar and the last man holed up with him.

Roya’s cousin, also a police officer, had called her home earlier to report that her father was wounded and in hospital. His body soon turned up at the morgue in her neighbourhood mosque.

She wept so hard as she told me about that day that I could barely make out the words down the long-distance line from Kandahar.

“I won’t cry,” she assured me, afraid I would give up the effort to hear her. “I will stand up to them.”

But she couldn’t stop the tears. Her grief was too powerful. I asked an Afghan colleague to take my questions to Roya in person, which created new complications.

It was too dangerous for him to visit her home. Roya, like her father, and the rest of her family, is a Taliban target.

“Since my father’s death, I received two threats over the phone saying that I am working with infidels, I am going to school, I am making other girls go the wrong way and teaching them improper things,” Roya said.

“They say I will be targeted sooner or later, and I will not be forgiven even if I stop going to school, because I am my father’s daughter. There will be no mercy for me and they won’t miss the chance to track me down and kill me one day.”

There isn’t a moment that fear’s grip weakens. She doesn’t even feel safe at home.

Yet Roya is still willing to risk going to the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre where she agreed to meet my colleague this week.

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It’s where, almost a year ago, I first heard her describe a lifelong dream to become a politician in a country where that alone can be a death sentence.

Her father planted the seed of leadership when she was a little girl and he taught her how to read and write and, on one fateful day, he placed his pillbox police cap on a low table where a little girl could touch it.

“We felt like we weren’t living in Afghanistan because of the freedom our father gave us,” she said. “He was not only my father. He was even more than a best friend. He was my model, everything to me.”

And so, each day, she does as she knows he would want her to do. She fights a little harder to overcome the fear.

Roya completed Grade 12 in June and started teaching other girls and women English and how to use computers and the Internet at the Afghan-Canadian centre.

She stopped after her father’s death because it was just too risky. She also decided not to start the second semester of a civics course set up for her by the Ottawa-based Canadian International Learning Foundation.

A teen once as bright and bold as a desert dawn now hides in the shadows at home.

Her sister, a university student, isn’t going to classes either. Another elder sister and brother, both doctors, are too afraid to work at their private clinics.

“Even when patients sometimes come to our home for a checkup, my mother tells them that my brother and sister are not at home,” Roya said.

“She is just making excuses to them because we cannot trust anyone. Who knows if the insurgents are trying to come, get information and target any one of us?”

Roya can only see one way out of a closing trap. She must leave Afghanistan, just for a few years she insists, long enough to get a university degree and return to keep up the fight as a politician.

It hurts Roya to say it, even think it, as her father’s words still echo in her mind: Country or coffin.

“Certainly, I will return to my country to serve this vulnerable and poor country, especially women,” she said.

“I have no interest in staying in a foreign country permanently because my country and people need me. The status and respect that I will enjoy here, I will never have abroad.”

But it isn’t easy to get out of Afghanistan, especially to a country like Canada, which Roya has come to know and admire through her schoolbooks, and the voices of teachers travelling over the Internet.

Now that few Canadians are left in Kandahar, she can only hope someone will toss her a lifeline from afar, and that she can grab hold of it before insurgents snatch the dream away.

“These stupid Taliban,” she told me, sobbing over the phone. “They make my life hell.”