This is this week’s cover of Time magazine. It is a portrait of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghani girl, taken by Jodi Bieber. Aisha was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws.
This story began when Aisha was just 8 years old. Her father had promised her hand in marriage, along with that of her baby sister’s, to another family in a practice called “baad.” “Baad” in Pashtunwali, the law of the Pashtuns, is a way to settle a dispute between rival families. At 16, she was handed over to her husband’s father and 10 brothers, who she claims were all members of the Taliban in Oruzgan province. Aisha didn’t even meet her husband because he was off fighting in Pakistan.
“I spent two years with them and became a prisoner,” she says.
Tortured and abused, she couldn’t take it any longer and decided to run away. Two female neighbors promising to help took her to Kandahar province, but when they arrived to Kandahar her female companions tried to sell Aisha to another man. All three women were stopped by the police and imprisoned. Aisha was locked up because she was a runaway. And although running away is not a crime, in places throughout Afghanistan it is treated as one if you are a woman.
A three-year sentence was reduced to five months when President Hamid Karzai pardoned Aisha, but eventually her father-in-law found her, and took her back home. That was the first time she met her husband - he came home from Pakistan to take her to Taliban court for dishonoring his family and bringing them shame. The court ruled that her nose and ears must be cut off, and the act was carried out by her husband in the mountains of Oruzgan where they left her to die.
But she survived, and with the help of an American Provincial Reconstruction Team in Oruzgan and the organization Women for Afghan Women, she is finally getting the help and protection she needs.
The fucking Taliban, man.
