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Taliban leader rejects women’s rights: ‘We will flog women in public, we will stone them to death’

March 27, 2024 | | Print Article

President Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal brought added consequences for women as a terrorist leader vowed to mete out medieval “justice.”

Fumbling and bumbling his way from one disaster to another, President Joe Biden has left behind a wake of economic, political and societal destruction. Particularly prevalent in the Middle East, while the administration cowed to demands of Hamas and their sympathizers, the Taliban’s supreme leader compounded the devastation wrought from the 2021 withdrawal.

“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in an audio message directed at Western leaders, translated by The Telegraph. “But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public.”

Putting sharia law at the forefront, the Taliban leader added, “These are all against your democracy, but we will continue doing it. We both say we defend human rights — we do it as god’s representative and you as the devil’s.”

“Do women want the rights that Westerners are talking about? They are against sharia and clerics’ opinions, the clerics who toppled Western democracy,” said Akhundzada. “I told the Mujahedin that we tell the Westerners that we fought against you for 20 years and we will fight 20 and even more years against you. It did not finish [when you left]. It does not mean we would now just sit and drink tea. We will bring sharia to this land.”

The mullah’s remarks led journalist Bilal Sarwary to conclude, in part, that there was “No hope for an inclusive government under his leadership.”

During a press briefing at the end of February, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had sought to blame the previous administration for what was currently going on in Afghanistan while simultaneously contending the incumbent was continuing “to hold the Taliban to their commitments.”

However, while Biden had made a point of lamenting how the Taliban barred women and girls from academics and careers, in May 2023 the United Nations released a report detailing the corporal punishment being dealt out publicly since the 2021 withdrawal.

“In the last six months alone, 274 men, 58 women and two boys have been publicly flogged,” stated the report which indicated more than 100 who had committed “crimes against God” had been subjected to punishments that included lashings while four had been sentenced to having walls knocked down on them.

“Corporal punishment is a violation of the Convention against Torture & must cease,” said UNAMA Human Rights chief Fiona Frazer at the time. “The UN is strongly opposed to the death penalty & encourages the DFA to establish an immediate moratorium on executions.”

Now, as Biden turned his focus toward supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza despite the likelihood of it ending up in the hands of Islamists, Tala, a former civil servant from Kabul warned The Telegraph that Western efforts to help her people were being undermined in the same way.

“The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” she said. “As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future.”

“We, the women, are living in prison. And the Taliban are making is smaller for us every passing day,” expressed Tala.

Kevin Haggerty
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