Authors: Rod Nordland
“There are many women in this country who the only thing they ever see is the inside of their father’s house, until they are married, when the only thing they ever see is the inside of their husband’s house, until they die, when the only thing they ever see is the inside of their casket,” Mr. Saeedi said. “All they will ever know is the house where they are born and the house where they die and the grave in which they lie.”
OTHER BATTLES IN THE AFGHAN WAR OF THE SEXES
THE RAPE OF BRESHNA
Even by the standards of Afghan misogyny, the rape of ten-year-old Breshna by her mullah stands out, and not just for the brutality of the crime.
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Afterward her family plotted to carry out an honor killing against the girl; the mullah pleaded innocent on the grounds that sex with the child was consensual, and then he jockeyed to marry her so he could get out of jail; she was rescued and put in a shelter but then ordered returned to her family despite the murder threat; other mullahs revised the victim’s age upward to try to lessen the crime; and when this all became public, the women’s advocate who protected Breshna was threatened by the office of the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and told to stop embarrassing the country over the rape of Breshna.
Breshna was rescued by Women for Afghan Women (WAW), which runs a women’s shelter in the northern city of Kunduz. For most of the war, Kunduz Province had been solidly government territory, with some Taliban presence in remote districts; by mid-2014, 90 percent of the province was dominated by the insurgents, and even the city of Kunduz, its capital, became dangerous after dark, and at one point fell to the Taliban during 2015.
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When I visited there in 2014, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, a pediatrician who
ran the WAW shelter, and her colleague, Nadera Geyah, the head of the women’s ministry for Kunduz Province, detailed what had happened to Breshna.
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She was then in the shelter in Kunduz but would soon be transferred to Kabul for more advanced medical treatment.
The girl was from the village of Alti Gumbad, in an Uzbek area that by the summer of 2015 had fallen under Taliban control; the former strongmen there were Afghan Local Police (ALP), pro-government militiamen, many of whom had previously been Taliban themselves. Dr. Sarwari’s take was that in Alti Gumbad they were
arbakai
by day and Taliban by night. As with so many other such units throughout Afghanistan, the
arbakai,
often branded as ALP, were trained and mentored by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) special-operations or special-forces troops (in this area sometimes fielded by the Germans but in most parts of the country by the Americans) as an expedient solution to increasing anti-Taliban manpower.
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Like many of the children her age, Breshna attended Koran classes at the local mosque in the village; they were coed classes, since the children were so young (classroom segregation by sex does not begin until after puberty). After class on May 1, 2014, the mullah, Mohammad Amin, asked her to stay behind as the other children left to sweep the floor of the mosque, and when she refused and ran, he chased her, caught her, and dragged her back. Mullah Amin took her to the holiest part of the mosque, the mihrab, the Mecca-facing niche where normally the imam would stand to lead the congregation in prayers, then unrolled his white turban, a religious garment that signifies his clerical office, and tied her up with it.
“The girl said she screamed at him, ‘Aren’t you afraid of God? God is watching you, and if you’re not afraid of God aren’t you afraid of those Korans?’” Dr. Sarwari said, relating what Breshna had told her. (A copy of the police interview with Breshna, obtained later, corroborated this account.) Breshna was referring to the holy books piled in the mosque for congregants. “And he said, ‘At this moment I am not afraid of anything.’” The rape was so
brutal that it caused a rectovaginal fistula—a rupture in the wall between the rectum and the vagina—and the girl began bleeding heavily, by both her account and the mullah’s later confession. He made her get dressed and finish sweeping the floor of the mosque, then sent her home. She was terrified to admit what had happened to her—the mullah had threatened to kill her family if she did. When Breshna began bleeding profusely at home, her mother thought she had begun menstruating unusually early and rushed her to the hospital in Kunduz. It did not take the doctors there long to figure out she had been raped; a fistula such as the one that Breshna had can be a life-threatening injury, and the girl lost so much blood that she needed a transfusion. From her hospital bed, Breshna confided to her mother and the doctors what had happened to her.
The mullah was arrested and soon confessed—sort of. His defense was the classic one, that the sex had been consensual. That the girl had asked for it and had wanted it and had even enjoyed it. That he thought she was twelve years old—an age that other mullahs would later bump up a few years in an effort to excuse what a fellow cleric had done. What follows is an excerpt from the attorney general’s statement summarizing the mullah’s confession:
Mohammad Amin, deeply aware of what he was doing, has made a joke of people’s trust and belief in mullahs and teachers and trampled on people’s beliefs, trust and religion by committing the act of rape in a place of worship. In addition to his rape and ignominy, Mohammad Amin confessed that he kissed and hugged her so often, which cannot be forgiven, and also as he said in his statement, “that when I was penetrating her she was saying, ‘
Ah, ah,
’” shows that this evil monster is not guilty about what he did, but he enjoyed it.
It was a story of depraved criminal conduct that could happen anywhere, in any culture. But there were plenty of “only in Afghanistan” elements that gave the case much greater significance. Dr. Sarwari went to the hospital the day after the rape and came
into the girl’s room to find her mother kneeling at her bedside and both of them crying. “My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now. We will make you a bed of dust and soil, we will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.” The mother told Dr. Sarwari that they had no choice, that her husband was under too much pressure from the other villagers to erase their communal shame by killing the girl.
On the same day, Nadera Geyah from the women’s ministry came to the hospital and saw the crowd of angry men waiting outside, including the girl’s father, two brothers, and two uncles. Inside the hospital she came across the girl’s aunt. Ms. Geyah is a tough, no-nonsense woman, and she soon got the aunt to confess to what Ms. Geyah already suspected: the aunt had just been sent in by the men to bring the girl out, despite her state. “Everyone is focusing on revenge. They want to kill the girl and the mullah. They don’t have the means to kill the mullah, and a lot of powerful people are behind the mullah, so they know they cannot do anything to him,” Ms. Geyah said. Their plan was to kill the girl as soon as they got her away from the hospital and dump her body in the river, she said.
“The poor mother must have been under so much pressure,” Dr. Sarwari said. “She cannot do anything. She is an Afghan woman. She doesn’t have any say over anything.”
“The girl is easy—they can get to her, she’s their daughter,” Ms. Geyah said. “They think they can wash their shame with her blood by killing her. It all comes down to honor. They believe she has brought shame to their family, and only by killing her can they rid that shame. She’s just a child. She is sick and vulnerable, and nobody cares. Everything comes down to honor. Her own mother said, ‘Let’s strangle her in the hospital and say she died there.’”
When they realized what was about to happen, both Dr. Sarwari and Ms. Geyah decided that the only way to protect the girl was to have her put under the protection of the shelter once she was out of the hospital and also to go public with her story, and they did so initially with local Afghan media. The story was picked up nationally and later, when I wrote about it for the
Times,
internationally. The blowback was intense and vituperative. Dr. Sarwari said she got
death threats from mullahs, many of them Taliban sympathizers—Mohammad Amin was a supporter of the insurgents, it turned out. One of his common themes when preaching was the evil of Western education, by which he meant education for girls. “They call me and curse me and threaten to kill me and my family and say they know where I live,” Dr. Sarwari said. They justified this by claiming that the girl was old enough to have consented, and they began saying that she was seventeen rather than ten.
The two women’s activists went on the counteroffensive and, in meetings with police and judicial officials in Kunduz, took pictures of Breshna to show around. She is a lovely young girl with striking black hair, delicate features, and she was obviously prepubescent. She had not started menstruating yet, she had no sign of any secondary sexual characteristics, and the hospital’s forensic exam confirmed that ten was her approximate age. Like most Afghans, Breshna did not have a birth certificate or other documentation of her age.
Breshna was so small, though, that it was difficult to believe she was any older than ten, the age her mother agreed she was as well. Dr. Sarwari said she weighed only about forty pounds at the time and was otherwise a well-nourished, healthy, normal-size child for that age.
The mullahs started revising her age back downward, from seventeen to thirteen, but stuck to their campaign of justification. When I talked to Maulawi Faiz Mohammad, head of the Kunduz Ulema Council, a semiofficial body sanctioned by the government that nominally includes all the mullahs in the province, he said that the clerics were not trying to excuse what Mullah Amin had done. He questioned if Amin was really a mullah—police said there was no doubt—and whether it had really been a rape. “We even said that his punishment should be double what regular people get for such a heinous act,” Mr. Mohammad said, once he abandoned the not-a-mullah tack. “I want to tell people that all mullahs are not lustful demons.”
But, he went on, “We have been in touch with the judge who is going to lead the hearing in this case. According to him the girl is
not ten but at least thirteen years old. She is more mature than what the women’s-rights groups claimed her age to be. Also the judge, Mohammad Yaqub, told a meeting of the Ulema and journalists that it was not a rape case, but consensual sex was involved. He said that the girl had some kind of affairs with the imam and that this case should be dealt with not as a rape but as an adultery case. We will never try to defend a criminal, regardless of who he is, but truth should be told and allegations should be debunked and dismissed. The reason women’s-rights groups claimed that she was ten and that she was raped by the imam was to defame the clerics and the Ulema.”
Even in Afghanistan, legally, sex with a child cannot be considered consensual, and even if Breshna were thirteen years old, that would still be three years under the age of consent.
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Marriages between girls that young and older men may be a commonplace practice, but they are also a criminal one, outlawed under both shariah and civil law. Also, it is hard to imagine consensual sex resulting in such serious injuries.
The police in Kunduz had no illusions about Breshna’s safety and agreed to let Dr. Sarwari move the girl into the Kunduz shelter to protect her from the honor-killing threat by her family. “We will not give her back unless the family gives a hundred-percent guarantee,” said Colonel Waisuddin Talash, the head of the Kunduz Police Criminal Investigation Division, who asserted that Bresha’s age, ten, was not a matter of serious dispute. “The girl was a child. She doesn’t even know anything,” he said. “No love was involved, no temptation involved, she hasn’t made a single mistake. She is just a victim.” Claims to the contrary, he said, were just the product of “ignorant, backward, uneducated people” and not typical of educated Afghans. He himself had two daughters, he said. I asked him what he would do if one of them were raped. He said he would never allow them to be punished in any way. Colonel Talash seemed sincere—crisply pressed, bemedaled uniform; immaculately groomed; hero walls full of framed pictures of him with various visiting ISAF officials, German Bundeswehr officers (Kunduz was the Germans’ area of operation during much of the war); and so on.
The official attorney general’s report noted that Mullah Amin had proposed a solution to the entire matter: He would simply marry Breshna. “Afterward he said he would kill my family if I tell what happened,” the girl was quoted by prosecutors. “He told me that when I get home, tell your mother that you want to marry the mullah.”
“That will never happen,” Colonel Talash said. In many rape cases in Afghanistan, that is what does happen, as an alternative to solve the honor problem for the victim’s family, an abusive customary practice that is illegal, but traditional and common. The case of the girl Gulnaz, who now lives with her rapist, as described earlier in this book, is just one example.
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It’s sometimes regarded as an act of kindness toward the female victim, because it removes the family’s perceived social obligation to kill her. Even in Afghanistan, though, such practices are usually imposed on older victims and stop short of marrying off ten-year-olds.
Officals could not let us see Breshna in the shelter for reasons of propriety—men are usually not allowed to enter women’s shelters—and in any case she was about to be transferred to Kabul for medical care; fistulas require specialized surgery, and no one in Kunduz was qualified to perform it. I’m not sure I would have wanted to do that interview. The girl was so young—Dr. Sarwari showed me a picture, on her laptop—and had been through so much trauma.
Breshna would soon be sent to the CURE International Hospital, a facility in Kabul that specializes in female and maternal health, which had American obstetric surgeons familiar with the procedure to repair fistulas.
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It was the only place in the country where there was specialized surgery for obstetrical and gynecological cases.