Taliban Torture in Pakistan

Was the video faked? Or was this girl actually flogged by the Taliban? And once the video was out, did it matter?

A year later, those men say the images from that day remain etched in their memories. The teenage militant wore white. The girl, a 17-year-old named Chand Bibi, stood behind a hastily made screen of sheets and shawls as she was flogged. She kept crying out, "Why? Why?"

But the rest of the world saw something quite different in a fuzzy, two-minute video shot by a lawyer that purported to show Chand Bibi's flogging.

That video, made famous in the age of YouTube and cellphone downloads, stunned the country and gave the world a disturbing view of the plight of Pakistanis trapped in Taliban-controlled regions such as the Swat Valley.
Did the video show another flogging, or was it even staged? And if so, does it matter?

Activists say it doesn't. The Taliban did flog Chand Bibi publicly, they point out, after the young woman and her fiance had been seen together in her house, which in the view of insurgents was a violation of Islamic law.

And whether her ordeal was the one shown on the notorious video or not, it awakened a nation that had underestimated the extent of the Taliban's reach.

"It was the catalyst," said Talat Farooq, executive editor of Criterion, a Pakistani current affairs magazine published in Islamabad. "When people spoke out about this, the tide turned and made it possible for the army to move into Swat."

In great detail, the man who says he took the video, Swat Valley lawyer Shaukat Saleem, described what he saw and how he recorded the event. Chand Bibi was stretched out on the ground face down, with men holding her down by her feet and arms, he said.

A Taliban commander in a turban and gray tunic knelt down and flogged the girl 30 times. Saleem says he secretly filmed the event using a cellphone he hid in his coat. To make an opening for the lens, he cut a hole into the coat's fabric.

"Whenever the lash came down, she would cry, ‘They are killing me! They are killing me!' " Saleem said in an interview in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. "Tears were coming to my eyes. My whole body was in shock, but I steadied myself because I wanted to capture this video at any cost."

Villagers in Kala Kalay say that, indeed, they saw Chand Bibi, as well as her fiance, flogged by the Taliban. But that is where the accounts diverge. Villagers say they have never heard of Saleem, and believe the video probably was of another flogging, either elsewhere in Pakistan or in Afghanistan.

By: Brant