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Taliban Forcibly Marrying Women, Young Girls, Some Even Minors In Afghanistan: Malisha Heena Khan
New Delhi: Afghani-Pak actress Malisha Heena Khan who reached Delhi today afternoon from Mumbai to meet with government officials, said that the Taliban were going door to door and house to house searching for women and young girls, some of them even minors and forcibly marrying them.
“Some of the girls are as young as 14 or 15 years of age. They are being forcibly kidnapped and married by the Taliban. But it’s just not marriage. The marriage is just a farce. They are forced to have sex with several men each day, at times even 10 men, causing grave physical injury and harm to their person, not to forget the mental trauma that each youth has to bear. Many girls even commit suicide. This is the truth of the Taliban,” Malisha Heena Khan told this reporter.
Heena-Khan’s account is similar to what a journalist who escaped from Afghanistan has to say: Hollie McKay, writing in The Dallas Morning News and further reported by news agency ANI claimed:
“The Taliban have been going house-to-house, looking for women and girls over 15 for marriage. A month ago, insurgent members arrived on the doorstep of her friend’s home in Badakhshan, which fell to the group several months ago, looking for young brides, an Afghan woman Fariha Easer, told her, McKay claimed in her article, saying that Easer was given this information by another friend, who was working with displaced women in Afghanistan.
According to McKay,”They (the Taliban) were saying that they are the saviours, the guards of Islam, the liberators of the West,” Fariha said in a tiny but firm voice.
“They asked one father to give over his daughters as wives. They said one of the Taliban is a mullah, and they must make an engagement for him.”
Only the request, as told to Fariha, was a rhetorical one. There was no choice. The unmarried 21-year-old was taken away in the dead of night.
“After the marriage, they took the young woman away. But the father found out after three days that it was not only the Taliban who married her and had sex with her, she was being raped by four others every night,” Fariha recounted the story.
“The father went to the district governor and was told there was nothing he could do. Whatever could be done, he must do himself.”