The Taliban Gang Raped My Friend's Sister
We Should Be Ashamed Of Ourselves
I’ve seen the wreckage of war. Once you’ve been around it long enough, you don’t look at the world the same.
In 2006, I responded to my first car bomb in the Karrada Peninsula. It wasn’t a mass casualty event, but it did kill a few Iraqis near the Iraqi Communist Party (no shit).
The streets of Baghdad were full of misery. It reeked of shit, piss, and the pungent stench of death that is forever engrained in my mind. I can still smell it when I let myself return to that moment.
I saw my first child gang-raped halfway through my push. Her dead, limpless body lay strewn across a non-descript Ford Ranger. Nobody even blinked an eye. The level of barbarity had reached such a low point that not even a dead young girl made a dent.
I never forgot that girl’s dead body. I could tell she had been raped. It was obvious. There is no coming back from something like that. All of your innocence shatters in the blink of an eye.
That’s when you get the first sweet taste of vengeance, that magnificent drug. For the first time in your life, you realize you’ve seen something that could make you kill—-without mercy.
In the years that followed, killing became part of my life. I didn’t do much of it up close and personal. I shot at things shooting at me. Maybe I got lucky and killed someone. I do not even remember anymore, to be honest. Everything now blends into a never-ending array of stories.
I learned how the Afghans fought in the shadows, serving as an intelligence advisor inside the Ministry of Interior. During my meetings with my counterparts, I saw all of the horrors the Taliban inflicted on the innocent.
How many raped dead girls does it take for you to become numb?
I don’t know. But, at this point, it doesn’t even make me blink. That’s the thing about seeing the elephant. Once you see the true barbarity inside each of us, the world opens up for the truly brave. You realize that all of us — even you reading this right now —are capable of savagery.
For all the mistakes that we and the Afghans made, none of them come close to the sadistic barbarity of the Taliban. They’ve murdered so many of my friends. So many that I don’t even remember them all.
They executed General Sorhab Azimi after the United States abandoned him and his men. And the country collectively shrugs its shoulders while it navel gazes about the Doha Agreement, Abbey Gate, and the litany of other mistakes in a never-ending game of who is to blame for Afghanistan.
But let’s get real: nobody really cares about Afghanistan. Why? Because the American people don’t give two shits about it. Thus, people who spend their entire lives talking about people of color abandoned a generation of them. Hence, people who speak of honor, duty, and loyalty signed a surrender agreement with a genocidal terrorist organization.
How do I make sense of this? How do my brothers-in-arms make sense of this? Why should any of us care about this country anymore?
We shouldn’t. But we still do because we naively believe this country can be decent, even though I’m starting to think we’re no longer the good guys. The good guys don’t abandon their friends to monsters.
Tragically, the Taliban have murdered and raped friends of mine for nearly my entire adult life. While most Americans serving in Afghanistan slept in relative comfort—not all, mind you, but most—the Afghans had to survive in bare base conditions. Often, the Taliban’s intelligence services would hunt for the families of those serving alongside me.
When they found them, they were merciless. Gang rapes. Some Afghans who I paid to pave a road were hung in their village for all to see.
Thus, I wasn’t surprised when a friend sent me a message a few weeks ago that the Taliban had gang raped his sister.
I spoke to this dear friend of mine. I tried to sit with him from afar and grieve with him. I didn’t get the details. I asked him if I could write about how it made me feel, and he asked for space to write his thoughts first. And what he wrote was haunting.
They didn’t just assault her; they mocked her. As they violated her body, they taunted her with the name of her brother, the colonel, who had once fought with the Americans. “Call him,” they sneered. “Call your brother and his American masters to come save you.” They weren’t just attacking her as an individual; they were attacking everything she represented—her family, her dignity, and the promises of freedom that once seemed within reach. They left her broken and beaten, a cruel reminder of the price women pay in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
Read the whole thing.
My friend believed in us, and we abandoned his family to a terrorist organization gang-raping his sister.
We did that—all of us. We’re all to blame for Afghanistan. Perhaps one day, we can finally admit what we did to my friends.
You cannot say that you support the troops if you cannot support their allies we abandoned. You cannot abandon people who spent their lives fighting YOUR war on terror.
That’s not how honor works, ladies and gentlemen.
But perhaps we’re no longer an honorable nation.
"But perhaps we’re no longer an honorable nation." Will, was this much different than what we did in Vietnam? Perhaps we stopped being an honorable nation a long time ago. I'm not suggesting that the US military stopped, but our political masters surely did.
I read your friend's story about his sister. It feels unseemly to check a "like" box for such stories. There should be an option that says "I hear". What happened to your friend's sister is terrible beyond words. I was brought up short while reading his story by the fact that her husband left her, taking their child. Left his wife after she had been so grievously attacked. Please don't talk about cultural differences; your friend, also an Afghan, did not abandon his sister. His sister's husband was no man at all, in my view. Or my husband's.