Katharine Steers reports on the capture and execution of a female policewoman by the Taliban as well as the U.N.’s response to the violence.
By Katharine Steers Credit: The Myriad News
A young civilian woman is executed by the Taliban
The Taliban captured and killed a Hazara policewoman in Ghazni, according to the victim’s family and government representatives on Monday. Fatima Rajabi, 23, an employee of the Ministry of Interior was kidnapped en route to her village, Jaghori. It took three days for her family to conclude she was in fact missing before they began to search.
Upon the news of Rajabi’s abduction, neighbors, village elders, the local imam and Rajabi’s elderly mother Mariam Akarbi, visited the local Taliban in hopes of securing her release. Their efforts failed.
“I went and begged, I lowered myself at their feet, so my sweet daughter could come back to me alive,” Akarbi told the New York Times. “They told me ‘You are old, we respect you, but don’t come again.’”
After about two weeks, Rajabi’s dead body was returned to her family. Her neighbor, Ali Naghi, attended her burial which occurred that same day after waiting for approximately three hours for the bleeding to stop.
“Her sisters said that she seemed fine from the neck up but was tortured from the neck down,” Naghi told Reporterly.net. “She was shot in the front and her hands and feet were black,”
Rajabi’s brother, Samiullah Rajabi, gave a similar account, claiming she was shot eight times and explaining the visual evidence of torture.
The U.N. explain their worries in a recent report
Rajabi is the Taliban’s latest civilian caught in the crossfire of the Afghanistan conflict. The United Nations (UN) has recently communicated its increasing worry regarding the upsurge of civilian executions by the Taliban.
Approximately 3,500 civilians were murdered or brutally injured in just the first half of the year as stated in a UN report. The report credited 43 percent of the aforementioned number to the Taliban, a 33 percent climb from the same period in 2019. The Afghan military forces come in at 23 percent. Nearly half of the victims were women and children; a large portion of which is due to an increase of airstrikes by the Afghan forces.
On account of the United States’ plan to have entirely evacuated within the next 14 months, the number of US troops is steadily decreasing. Peace negotiations between the pro-government Afghan troops and the Taliban have ceased as widespread brutality prevails. Although there were plans for Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American diplomat, to urge negotiations in March, that ploy has since been hindered due to a recent dispute concerning a hostage exchange.