Kabul's women list kidnap horrors
By James Rupert
Special to the Tribune

The Chicago TribuneNovember 27, 2001

KABUL, Afghanistan -- One morning a couple of weeks ago, Afghangul made her bread dough as usual and sent her daughters, Nargis, 16, and Lida, 9, to carry it to the local bakery.

A few hundred yards from their front door in a slum of mud-brick houses in central Kabul, the girls passed a pickup truck full of Taliban militiamen who periodically patrolled the neighborhood. The men grabbed Nargis and dragged her, screaming, into the truck.

"Lida came running and crying," said Afghangul, 42. "We ran to the place but found only the dough dropped on the ground," she said as she wept. "We don't know what they will do. Marry her by force? Kill her? Sell her to the Arabs?"

During the past few years, the United Nations and human- rights organizations have cited reports of abductions for forced marriages and rape.

On Nov. 17, the State Department issued a report saying "the Taliban has perpetrated egregious acts of violence against women, including rape, abduction and forced marriage."

As the Northern Alliance installs itself in government offices once occupied by the Taliban here, its officials say Kabul residents have told horrific tales that point to marriage by kidnapping and forced sex.

The officials say Taliban and allied fighters -- Arabs, Pakistanis or others -- kidnapped women and girls from around Kabul, especially in the days before the Islamic militant movement fled the capital Nov. 12.

Northern Alliance officials say they have not yet counted the cases reaching various judicial and police offices now being slowly established here.

However, Gen. Mohammed Qasim Faizi, a prosecutor at the nascent Justice Ministry, said that the number of women who have disappeared runs at least into the hundreds.

"Just from the families of our ministry, they have taken 10 people," Faizi said. The Taliban also seized an unknown number from a women's prison they operated in Kabul, officials said.

"My office has received about 70 or 80 cases" from Kabul and its environs, said Gen. Din Mohammed Jurat, the newly installed director of public safety.

"With the cooperation of the girls' families, we have recovered about 20 of them" and arrested a number of Taliban and foreign militants who failed to flee Kabul before the Northern Alliance's arrival, he said. Other women appear to have been taken to Taliban-controlled areas in the south, he said.