Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Widow Shah Jan sits in an icy room with mud walls in a snowfield on the edge of Kabul. She wipes her tears with the edge of her grimy sweater as she recalls the day in August 1999 when the Taliban set fire to her home in the vineyards of the Shomali Plain and kidnapped her best friend, Nafiza. "The Taliban burst in with their guns and torches," says Shah Jan. "None of us even had time to put on our veils...
...conquering Taliban. Now it is clear from the testimony of witnesses and officials of the new government that the ruling clerics systematically abducted women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic minorities they defeated. Stolen women were a reward for victorious battle. And in the cities of Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad and Khost, women victims tell of being forced to wed Taliban soldiers and Pakistani and Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, who later abandoned them. These marriages were tantamount to legalized rape. "They sold these girls," says Ahmad Jan, the Kabul police chief...
...fortress villages above the Shomali vineyards, more than 600 women vanished in the 1999 Taliban offensive. Yet these abductions are considered such a great dishonor that the victims' families almost never mention them. Says Qadria Yasdon Parast, leader of Freedom Messengers, a Kabul women's rights group: "If you ask about the missing, they'll say, 'Our daughter's dead,' or that she's off married in Pakistan." Many of the women probably did end up in Pakistan--but were sold to brothels or kept as virtual slaves inside homes, say officials from relief agencies. None have come back. Even...
Orders to abduct women came from the Taliban leaders, say the Kabul police, but not all commanders obeyed. In the Shomali Plain, Taliban commander Nuruludah says, he saw women being forced onto trucks by Pakistani members of al-Qaeda, so he gathered 10 men, ambushed the trucks and released the women. In Jalalabad too, a few local Taliban eventually stormed the camp and freed the women who remained there. These were the heroic exceptions. For others, apparently, the profound degradation of women seemed perfectly tolerable...
...probably on his way to a madrasah, an Islamic school, in Pakistan. In 1999 and 2000, Reid appears to have spent much of his time in Pakistan. He seems certain to have crossed the border from Pakistan to a terrorist camp in Afghanistan-probably Khalden, not far from Kabul...