Two things.
The Taliban definitely don't believe love = marriage.
The Taliban are way jealous of all the press the Iranians are getting about stoning. WAY.
They were stoned to death on Sunday. The stoning was carried out by hundreds of villagers and by their own families, who had tricked them into thinking all was forgiven and it was safe to come back. Boy, were they wrong, right?
Various comments from the article are just chilling:
“We see it as a sign of a new confidence on the part of the Taliban in the application of their rules, like they did in the ’90s,” said Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “We do see it as a trend. They’re showing more strength in recent months, not just in attacks, but including their own way of implementing laws, arbitrary and extrajudicial killings.”
Reports indicate that the Taliban hold is strengthening all over Afghanistan, even in regions where it previously held no power.
“We’ve seen a big increase in intimidation of women and more strict rules on women,” Nader Nadery said.
And furthermore:
Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.
And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.
Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.
© Bright Nepenthe, 2010