The Taliban announced that they have arrested and will soon sentence an Afghan woman who appeared in a video on social media earlier this week and said that a senior Taliban official forced her into marriage and repeatedly raped her.
In the video, the woman, who gave only her first name Elaha, wept as she described how former Taliban Interior Ministry spokesman Saeed Khosti beat and raped her.. She said that she was talking about her from an apartment in Kabul where the Taliban had confined her after she tried to escape the country, and she begged to be rescued from her.
“These may be my last words. It will kill me, but it is better to die once than to die every time.”said.
On Wednesday night, a day after the video surfaced, the Taliban-run Supreme Court said in a tweet that Elaha had been arrested for defamation on the order of Chief Justice Abdul Hakeem Haqqani. Without mentioning that no trial is taking place, she said that she would “soon be sentenced according to Sharia law.”
“Nobody can damage the name of the mujahideen or smear the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the 20 years of holy jihad”he said, referring to the Taliban and their war against US-led troops and the US-allied government, which hardline insurgents toppled just over a year ago.
Since the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, Afghan activists, as well as Amnesty International, have reported an increase in forced marriages of women, including cases where Taliban officials forced women into marriage by intimidating them or their families.
In the video, Elaha identified herself as a medical student at Kabul University and the daughter of a former government intelligence general. She said that Khosti had forced her to marry six months ago, when he still held the position of spokesman. Khosti tried to marry his sister off to another Taliban official, but her family successfully fled, he said.
“Saeed Khosti beat me a lot. Every night he raped me,” she said through tears.
She said she tried to escape to neighboring Pakistan, but the Taliban arrested her at the border crossing and took her back to Kabul and confined her to an apartment there. After she was brought back, she heard a Taliban member tell Khosti that she had lived under the previous government for 20 years and should be stoned to death as an infidel.said.
In tweets on Wednesday, Khosti confirmed that he had married Elaha, but denied that he mistreated her. “I assure you that I have done nothing illegal,” he wrote. In recent months, Khosti has been transferred from his position as spokesman and it is not clear what his new position will be.
Khosti said he divorced her after discovering that she “He had a problem in his faith” and accused her of insulting Islam’s holy book, the Koran.
Elaha’s video was widely shared on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp groups, sparking a wave of calls for help and denunciations of the Taliban from women activists.
Since taking power, the Taliban have placed increasing restrictions on women. They have prevented many women from working, banned teenage girls from school and required women in public to cover themselves completely except for their eyes. The world has refused to recognize the Taliban’s rule, demanding that they respect human rights and show tolerance towards other groups.
(with information from AP)
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Source-www.infobae.com