A 19 year old Afghan woman was stoned to de*ath after she was accused of adultery. The video of her stoning that has been widely shared on the internet shows that she was forced to sit in a deep hole dug for her in her home village in Ghor, a remote province in western Afghanistan. The video shows dozens of men sitting and standing around the hole pelting rocks at her.
Several Afghan news outlets say that Rokhshana was forced to marry an old man who had lost both his arms and legs when she was only 13. That wasn’t okay with her, so she ran away with a boy about her age to another village. Police and she was given to her parents after being arrested. Her father decided to make her marry another old man for the second time. And Rokhshana wouldn’t agree to the second marriage either. She and her boyfriend were running away, this time to a different village. She was lucky that she wasn’t arrested on the way to her new destination.
At the same time, a local Taliban leader told Rokhshana’s father that he wanted her to marry his brother, but her father chose to marry her to someone else. Rokhshana was on her way to another village when she was arrested by Taliban members in her own village. Within hours, they asked her farmer father for around $80,000, which is about 5 million Afghanis, to free her. Rokhshana’s dad wasn’t able to pay the bill. Within hours, the Taliban in the area decided what would happen to her and said she would be stoned to de*ath for adultery. The Taliban asked her dad to be there when they stoned his daughter, and he did.
The k*illing of Rokhshana was strongly condemned by the Office of the President of Afghanistan, which said it was “extrajudicial, criminal, and un-Islamic.” According to President Ashraf Ghani, a group has been sent to look into the stoning of Rokhshana and bring those responsible to justice.
Other religious leaders in the area have also spoken out against the stoning and asked the government to find and punish those responsible. Lawyers in Kabul, members of civil society, and other politicians all spoke out against Rokhshana’s brutal and inhumane de*ath.
During the time of the Taliban, women were often punished by being stoned and whipped. But in places where the Taliban are in charge, they still punish women in this horrible way to scare them. Since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, many women have been stoned to deat*h. Rokhshana was not the first woman to be ki*lled in this way.
