Article..... Why we're at war.
newsoftheworld.co.uk
It was midnight when a Taliban rape squad burst into Shakeela Farooq's home then took it in turns to defile her, a Kalashnikov muzzle jammed against her head and her husband forced to watch.
In the time it took half a dozen masked men to barge through the door, Shakeela managed to hide her 11-year-old daughter under a pile of bedclothes where she lay trembling at her mother's cries.
But a second daughter, eight-year-old Somia, was still in view. Heartbroken by the onslaught she had witnessed, she was taken screaming into the night to be abused at the soldiers' leisure.
But the greatest horror of all is that in Afghanistan, its towns and cities ruled by women-hating butchers, perverts and sadists, this was not an unusual night.
The border with Pakistan is teeming with traumatised women. Wives degraded, mothers tortured, daughters murdered or stolen.
Through an interpreter I talked to three. Besides Shakeela there was a 30-year-old mother raped 50 times by her jailers in a cell, and a woman who cannot rid herself of her ‘guilt' at being gang-raped by the Taliban four times.
Meat
Two of the women identified the ultimate figure of hate in their despair — Osama bin Laden, the man who bankrolls this regime's excesses and infects them with his warped ranting.
"Everything bad about the Taliban is down to Osama bin Laden," says Shakeela bitterly. "I hate him."
We are speaking outside Peshawar in Pakistan.
"The Taliban have taken so many little girls," 35-year-old Shakeela says flatly. "The soldiers come looking for our daughters in groups of about six but sometimes there can be as many as 20. They raid our homes especially for this purpose.
"They like to take little girls between the ages of eight and 14, then they sexually abuse them for two, maybe three months. It is as if they are trying them out. Once they have had their way with them, they either marry them or throw them out like pieces of meat.
"The majority of these little girls commit suicide because of the shame. There is no shame worse in our society. You see, they are not fit for anything after that."
Reliving the night of the attack, she continues: "Six of them broke into our home. I was terrified. I managed to hide Nabila but before I could hide Somia, the men had turned on me. These soldiers think nothing of raping women in front of their children.
Begged
"Somia was cowering in a corner, screaming. When my husband tried to do anything they beat him. I thought they were going to kill me. They were grabbing at my breasts like animals and they all took turns with me one after another.
"I tried to fight them off but they held a Kalashnikov to my head and beat me if I resisted. I begged them to spare my little girl but they arrested my husband and snatched Somia too. She was screaming and screaming, trying to grab my hand-but that was the last I ever saw of either of them.
"I was terrified that the soldiers would come back for me and Nabila. We left our home that night and would stay one day with one person then another, day by day. We tried to find out what had happened to my husband and daughter but we never saw or heard from them again.
"In the end, I had to think about Nabila's safety, so one night we ran away to Pakistan."
Shakeela now ekes out a meagre living making carpets and selling eggs. Her eyes are rimmed purple with strain. Placing a protective arm around Nabila, she adds: "I can only presume that Somia is dead. I know that I shouldn't say this, but I hope she is dead. That is far better than suffering such abuse."
The attack took place in 1997, a year after the Taliban captured the Afghan capital Kabul. "Before they came I was a very happy," she sighs. "I even liked being a woman.
"But they banned women from the bazaars and ordered us to cover ourselves down to our wrists and ankles. They made us wear the burqa if we dared to leave our homes. I felt very uneasy about wearing the burqa. I had never had to wear one before. But I did because I saw what happened to women if they did not. The soldiers lashed them with sticks studded with nails."
Shakeela fetches her burqa to show me. It is now crumpled up in a ball. "The minute I crossed the border I ripped it off and I have never put it on again," she says. "But the Taliban did far crueller things than that.
"If a woman was caught just talking innocently to a man in the street, the man was thrown in a lock-up and the woman was lashed. If a man and a woman were caught having an affair, they had a special punishment. Soldiers would build a high wall and the man and the woman would be made to stand there as they knocked the wall over and crushed them to death. It is a horrible way to die.
"But the Taliban are all hypocrites. If they see a woman or a child that they like, they just decide that they are going to be theirs."
A former Taliban guard revealed last month that soldiers were given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and encouraged to "take wives"...effectively a licence to rape.
Shakeela's face only lights up when our talk turns to the US air strikes in Afghanistan. "I am glad that the US are bombing and that they are trying to capture Osama bin Laden," she says defiantly, her eyes turning towards the hills of her homeland. "I can never forget what happened there." |
