Lifting The Veil On Sex Slavery

Of all the ways the Taliban abused women, this may be the worst

Widow Shah Jan sits in an icy room with mud walls in a snowfield on the edge of Kabul. She wipes her tears with the edge of her grimy sweater as she recalls the day in August 1999 when the Taliban set fire to her home in the vineyards of the Shomali Plain and kidnapped her best friend, Nafiza. "The Taliban burst in with their guns and torches," says Shah Jan. "None of us even had time to put on our veils."

With the women stripped of their burkas, it was a simple task for the Taliban invaders to cull the...

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