The Taliban introduced that that they had arrested and would quickly punish an Afghan lady who appeared in a video on social media earlier this week saying a senior Taliban official pressured her into marriage. and raped her repeatedly.
In the video, the lady, who recognized herself solely by her first identify, Ilaha, cried as she described being overwhelmed and raped by Saeed Khosti, a former spokesman for the Taliban’s inside ministry. She mentioned she was talking from an condo in Kabul, the place the Taliban had imprisoned her after attempting to flee the nation, and pleaded for rescue.
“These may be my last words. He will kill me, but it is better to die once than to die every time.”
Late on Wednesday, a day after the video surfaced, the Taliban-run Supreme Court mentioned in a tweet that Ilaha was arrested on prices of defamation on orders from Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Without mentioning any trial, she mentioned she would “soon be sentenced according to Sharia law.”
“No one is allowed to harm the name of the Mujahideen or to defame the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and 20 years of holy jihad,” it mentioned, referring to the Taliban and their struggle towards US-led troops and the US-allied authorities. Said, which was toppled by the hardline rebels a 12 months earlier.
Since the takeover of the nation by the Taliban in August 2021, Afghan girls’s activists in addition to Amnesty International have reported a rise in pressured marriages of girls – together with circumstances the place Taliban officers have threatened girls or their households in marriage. Forced to.
In the video, Ilaha identifies herself as a medical pupil at Kabul University and the daughter of an intelligence service normal beneath the previous authorities. She mentioned that Khosti had pressured her to marry him six months in the past, when he was nonetheless within the submit of spokesperson. Khosti tried to get his sister married to a different Taliban official, however his household efficiently escaped, she mentioned.
“Saeed Khosti hit me hard. Every night he raped me,” she mentioned tearfully.
He mentioned he tried to flee to neighboring Pakistan, however the Taliban arrested him from throughout the border and introduced him again to Kabul and confined him to an condo there. When they introduced her again, she heard a Taliban member inform Khost that she had been beneath the previous authorities for 20 years and needs to be put to dying as an infidel, she mentioned. In tweets on Wednesday, Khosti confirmed that he married Ilaha, however denied misbehaving along with her. “I assure you that I have not done anything illegal,” he wrote. Khosti was sacked as his spokesman in current months and it’s not clear what his new place is.
Khosti mentioned he divorced her after discovering “there is a problem with her faith” and that he accused her of insulting the Quran, Islam’s holy e book. Ilaha’s video was shared broadly on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp teams, sparking a wave of requires Taliban assist and condemnation of girls activists.
Since seizing energy, the Taliban have imposed growing restrictions on girls. They have barred many ladies from work, barred teenage women from going to highschool and required girls to fully cowl themselves besides their eyes in public. The world has refused to acknowledge the Taliban’s regime, demanding that it respect human rights and present tolerance for different teams.
With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
