Even bigger cunts

[McFaul 35]

HERAT, Afghanistan — The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.

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Times Topic: Afghanistan

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Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

A car burned by a crowd during a riot that took place after the police rescued two teenagers from a group of men who had demanded that they be hanged or stoned for their relationship.

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Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The girl's father, Kher Mohammed, with his head in his hand, wants the government to kill her and her boyfriend.

It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

 

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

 

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

 

The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.

 

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

 

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

 

The teenagers, embarrassed to talk about love, said plainly that they were ready for death. But they were baffled by why they should have to be killed.

 

Mr. Mohammed, who is 17, said: “I feel so bad. I just pray that God gives this girl back to me. I’m ready to lose my life. I just want her safe release.”

 

Ms. Mohammedi, who believes she is 17, said: “We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?”

 

The case has resonated in Herat, in part because it stirred memories of a brutal stoning ordered by the Taliban last summer in northern Afghanistan.

 

A young couple in Kunduz was stoned to death by scores of people — including family members — after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video recording released online months later. Afghan officials promised to investigate after an international outcry, but no one has faced criminal charges.

 

The immediate response to the violence in Herat was heartening by comparison. Top clerics declined to condemn the couple. Police officers risked their lives to pull the two teenagers to safety and deposit them into the legal system, rather than the hands of angry relatives. And the police reported that five or six girls had fled the city with their boyfriends and fiancés in the weeks after the riot.

 

After discussing the case, the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government’s protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married.

 

“They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities,” said Abdul Zahir, the council’s leader.

 

But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security.

 

Ms. Mohammedi was initially taken to the only women’s shelter in this province of more than 1.5 million people, but the police transferred her quickly to the city’s juvenile detention center, a sun-washed building where about 40 girls and 40 boys sleep in separate dormitories. The police said they had referred the teenagers’ cases to prosecutors.

 

“From their point of view, she committed a crime,” said Suraya Pakzad, director of Voices of Women Organization, a rights group that provided Ms. Mohammedi with a bed for one night.

 

Ms. Pakzad said most of the women and girls in the shelters of western Afghanistan had fled forced or abusive marriages, or had been ostracized from their communities for dating young men without their families’ approval. Male relatives often punish such transgressions with beatings or death.

 

But in separate interviews at the juvenile jail, Ms. Mohammedi and Mr. Mohammed said they had not worried about such things.

 

He did not think about the rage that would erupt if a young Tajik man picked up a Hazara girl in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Hazaras, members of one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. “It’s the heart,” Mr. Mohammed said. “When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”

 

They had much in common. His father was dead, as was her mother. They described each other as quiet and polite, both a little shy. They liked the same sappy songs that float over from Iran.

 

After six years of primary school, Ms. Mohammedi had wanted to study English and take computer classes, but she said her family told her it was a waste of time, and sent her to work at the ice cream factory, for $95 a month.

 

There, at least, they found each other. Mr. Mohammed spent a month stealing hellos before Ms. Mohammedi tossed her phone number at his feet.

 

The couple talked on the phone most nights, even though her stepmother disapproved. After a year, they decided they were fed up with hiding their relationship. They would meet, go to the courthouse and get married. Mr. Mohammed persuaded an older cousin to take him to the village of Jabrail, where she was waiting in the town square.

 

They had not driven 30 feet when a yellow Toyota Corolla blocked their path and angry men jumped out. Ms. Mohammedi was not hurt in the melee that followed, but the crowd beat up the cousin and pummeled Mr. Mohammed until he collapsed.

 

“We knew they would kill us,” she said.

 

They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other’s sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes.

 

Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.

 

They have their world we have ours. They have been brutal savages for centuries, it's how they live, they are governed by evil. I'm shocked and sickened by this story this morning and basically we can't do anything to help these people, it's their way or life to act an in humane way, yet the west is the great satan. God it fuckin winds me up. They should have their world we should have ours, America opened the biggest can of worms in human history because of their greed, and opened to our eyes to the horrors of Afghan muslim evils.

[ewerk 30682]

Shit was worse under the Tallyban.

[Gemmill 44996]

Backwards society.

[Kitman 2207]

I think they're a medieval people. Which is why it's pretty pointless expecting them to change. Best to hot foot it out of there and leave them to it imo.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Oh hi, I'm jonasjuice, a massive cunt. Tbh,I think if we implemented this kind of thing over here it would benefit society. Toodles!

[McFaul 35]

I think they're a medieval people. Which is why it's pretty pointless expecting them to change. Best to hot foot it out of there and leave them to it imo.

Absolutely spot on. We should never have went in to Iraq even in 1991 man, let them cunts sort it oot, all of these middle east invasions are based on greed. Going in to Afghanistan was looking under the scab of the muslim world.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

let them cunts sort it oot, all of these middle east invasions are based on greed.

 

Afghanistan might have had something to do with not wanting the Taliban/Al Quaeda forces to gain 100% control of the country (they weren't far off in 2001), launching more attacks such as 9/11, and gaining control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal after they made inroads there.

 

I agree with you that we shouldn't have gone to Iraq in 1991, it should have been done (and finished) a couple years earlier when Hussein began a genocide of the Kurds, killing up to 100000 civilians from 1986-89.

Edited August 1, 2011 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[Jusoda Kid 1]

Fucking cavemen

[The Fish 10876]

They have ice cream factories in Afghanistan?

 

Taliben & Jerry's?

Edited August 1, 2011 by The Fish

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

Does anyone actually believe America invaded Iraq because of shit like this? Also, the NYT has stories like this in every week, the war machine in full flow

[Park Life 71]

Let's go out and get stoned baby!

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I gather you feel strongly about this J69. Did you protest against the removal of Saddam Hussein before his fall?

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

No

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Was it only after his demise that you realised how much you missed him and his incredible system of governance?

 

 

sup homie?

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

He probably killed less people then this bloke tbh

 

[Billy Castell 0]

I'd cut a deal wthe Taliban. I'd say, you can have Afghanistan on the condition that you stamp out the heroin and leave Pakistan alone. They can live in their fucking mud huts, staring at their dusty shithole for all eternity whilst we get on with our business. If any British born Muslims want Shariah Law, they can get on a plane and fuck off over there. In fact, I'd send all the 'Mad Mullahs' on a plane tonight if I could.

 

You cannot force people like this to be anything civilised. They are animals, and should be left to rape their own, behead their own and shit in their tents over there in Afghanistan. If they do it here, then they should be deported.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

He probably killed less people then this bloke tbh

 

 

Have you been sat around the psych ward watching Michael Moore films on your nightshift?

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

I'm actually being serious. If you tallied up how many people were killed during Bush's reign or Saddam's who do you think would be higher?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Well, not only are you wrong in your assertion, it's so stupid and thoughtless as to not warrant a serious response. There are resources freely available to you to research such things as Saddam Hussein's regime and the wars during Bush's presidency. If you had taken some time to do so you wouldn't make such laughably ignorant statements. Really my mistake was actually engaging with you at all, because the only thing you add to discussions like this are mind-numbingly idiotic arguments with no basis in reality; the sort of thing you'd expect from an angry 15 year old who's just finished reading 'Dude where's my country?' and runs round screaming anti-american rhetoric in a che guevara tee shirt.

Edited August 1, 2011 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

And who do you think publishes those statistics?

[CleeToonFan 1]

Let's take the good people out of Afghanistan, and get everyone in the world to send their shit there. We could send the EDL, the BNP, the ott Sharia Law "jihadist" wankers, anyone who goes on Jeremy Kyle and the whole of Sunderland, i'd take the good people from Afghanistan in return for that. The rest of the world can go hand in hand happy and those cunts can fight it out between themselves for kings of the cunts.

[Kid Dynamite 7034]

It's also worth noting the west didn't invade the middle east to end atrocities like this but rather in search of make believe nukes. There's plenty of other atrocities taking place around the world, the Congo and Zimbabwe spring to mind, that we aren't quite as interested in or read about in the mail or new york times on a daily basis. T