A mother who was tortured by the Taliban when she was two months pregnant has said she fears for the future of women as the militant group would “feed them to dogs.”
Mother whose eyes were gouged out by Taliban claims women are ‘fed to dogs’
Khatera, 33, speaking from Delhi, said her eyes were gouged out in an attack that had been plotted by her own father, a former Taliban fighter.
In a harrowing account of the attack, he told News18 that the Taliban shot him eight times in the upper body in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province last year.
She told how she was on her way home from work when she found herself surrounded by three Taliban fighters who, after checking her identification, began shooting at her.
“They (the Taliban) first torture us (women) and then discard our bodies to display them as a token of punishment,” said Khatera, who also suffered deep knife wounds.
“One has to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban to even imagine the hell that has befallen women, children and minorities there.”
“In the eyes of the Taliban, women are not living, breathing human beings, but simply some meat and flesh to be abused,” he added.
Khatera now lives in Delhi with her young son and husband, and worries about what the future holds for women in Afghanistan now that the Taliban have regained control.
Khatera said, “The Taliban do not allow women to visit male doctors and, at the same time, they do not allow women to study and work. So what is left for a woman? Abandoned to die. They don’t just kill women. They make animals feed on their bodies.”
The Taliban recently announced that they have “relaxed their stance” on women’s rights. But they have also signaled that they want to ban women from employment and reuse the law requiring women to be accompanied by a man.
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