Author: Ophelia Benson

Read more about Malalai Kakar, murdered by the brave pious merciful compassionate caring decent Taliban. (Thanks to mirax for the link.)

Most mornings, before her children wake, she peeks out her front door to look for a “night letter”-a death threat from the Taliban pinned to her home that she doesn’t want her children to see. “The notes say things like ‘Quit the force, or else,’” she says, with a thin smile. “Of course, I won’t.”…Malalai points out that women’s participation in law enforcement is not just about them. It is about the thousands of women in Kandahar who have been denied police assistance time and again, because the Muslim community does not allow men to interact closely with women they aren’t related to.

One down; how many more to go?

Perhaps the biggest reason the force needs women is the escalating rate of domestic violence in Afghanistan. There were 47 documented domestic murders in the country in 2005 and 20 in the first half of 2006, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Moreover, they estimate that up to 80 percent of marriages are forced. Almost 60 percent of girls are married before the age of 16, some as young as 6. Incidents of self-immolation (in which a woman who has been physically or emotionally abused sets herself on fire as a means of protest) have risen dramatically since 2003, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.

Like so:

Malalai…searched the house and found a woman and her son chained by their hands and feet. They’d survived for 10 months on crusts of bread and cups of water. The woman, a widow, was handed over by her in-laws to her brother-in-law after her husband passed away. The brother married her and divorced her, a major taboo that guaranteed she would be a social outcast for the rest of her life. When she went to pick up her belongings, the brother-in-law forced her and her son into a cage and held them captive. “The Taliban may threaten me,” Malalai says. “But because of stories like rescuing this woman, the women and children love me.”

But now she’s gone, and the bastards have won.

This upsets me so much I can hardly see straight – the head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women murdered on her way to work. Bastards, bastards, bastards.

Taleban rebels, who banned women from joining the police when they were in power, said they had carried out the shooting. “We killed Malalai Kakar,” a Taleban spokesman told AFP news agency. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”

Well aren’t you clever. That’s a real accomplishment, isn’t it – you had guns, and so you were able to shoot someone to death. Guess what – anybody can do that. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s cowardly; anybody can do it. But it’s only low-life thuggish bullying chickenshit scum who want to do it. People like you. People who want to make crimes against women into sacred rites. People who want to turn all of life into blank meaningless obedient hell on earth. People who want to destroy everything any good and replace it with their horrible murderous oppressive mindless death-loving gun-toting masculinist selves. Scum. I hope Allah appears to you in your dreams and tells you what loathsome shits you are and you wake up just long enough to cut your own heads off.