Love in the time of Sharia

Two star-crossed lovers, though this isn’t a Shakespearean play unfolding in fair Verona. It’s Kunduz province in Afghanistan, where local leaders are enforcing a move toward the harshest forms of physical punishment allowed by Sharia, or Islamic law.

Per the report in the Los Angeles Times:

The young lovers didn’t stand a chance. In a desolate field on the edge of their village in northern Afghanistan, hundreds of men, stones in hand, closed in to carry out the mullah’s death sentence, handed down after the pair eloped against the wishes of their families.

[…] The couple’s gruesome deaths came just one week after another public execution, also in a remote northern village. There, a widow in her 40s was flogged and then shot for conceiving a child out of wedlock with a man she intended to marry, according to accounts by villagers and local officials.

These event come despite Taliban leadership attempts to position itself as a defender of civilian life. Just this month, insurgents issued a code of conduct discouraging the killings of noncombatants, which was quickly followed by the Taliban’s offer to participate in a joint commission with Western military, the United Nations and the Afghan government to investigate and address the deaths and treatment of civilians.

Dangerous times.

Image by Michelle B.