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20th Aug 2021

Taliban set woman on fire for bad cooking, according to reports

Steve Hopkins

Afghan lawyer also suggested women have been shipped into neighbouring countries in coffins to be used as sex slaves

The Taliban set a woman on fire for ‘bad cooking’, reports claim, amid growing fears the insurgents are returning to their barbaric ways.

Former Afghan judge Najla Ayoubi told Sky News that a woman was yesterday “put on fire because she was accused of bad cooking for Taliban fighters” in the north of the country.

The report follows news on Friday that the Taliban shot dead a family member of an editor working for German public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, and seriously injured another, as insurgents began tracking down western-affiliated journalists in western Afghanistan.

The broadcaster said the Taliban had carried out house-to-house searches to try to find the journalist, who had already relocated to Germany, The Guardian reported. Other family members managed to escape and were on the run, a Deutsche Welle spokesperson told the newspaper.

Ayoubi, the chief of coalition and global programmes at Every Woman Treaty, told Sky News said had to “flee for my life” from the Taliban for constantly speaking for women’s rights.

She had been speaking with women in the country, she said, and had received examples of  “bad behaviour and violence against women” by the Taliban. The Taliban claimed Kabul on Sunday after a ten-day Afghanistan assault.

The lawyer added: “They are forcing people to give them food and cook them food.

“Also there are so many young women are being in the past few weeks being shipped into neighbouring countries in coffins to be used as sex slaves.

“They also force families to marry their young daughters to Taliban fighters. I don’t see where is the promise that they think women should be going to work, when we are seeing all of these atrocities.”

Ayoubi described life under the Taliban as a “nightmare”, saying she was in a “powerful position” the day before it took power, then became “nothing in the society”.

To illustrate the point, the judge told Sky News she had to be accompanied by her neighbour’s four-year-old boy to the grocery shop. The Taliban don’t let women leave the house without being accompanied by men.

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