ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Face down before a crowd, the teenage girl shrieks and writhes, begging for mercy. But the three masked men holding her down merely tighten their grip while a fourth man whips her again and again.
The video of a 17-year-old girl being flogged publicly by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley has galvanized the nation, drawing protests from human rights groups, denunciations from the central government and expressions of revulsion from Pakistanis.
The video, shot earlier this year, surfaced today on Pakistani television stations and the Internet.
While reports of abusive acts by the Taliban for months have filtered out of the northwestern valley, where the government in February struck a truce with Islamic militants, such brutal scenes are rarely captured on camera and publicly aired.
“This is intolerable,” Asma Jahangir, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan,, told journalists in the eastern city of Lahore.
Jahangir said the girl was believed to have refused to marry a Taliban commander. The militants then accused her of immoral behavior and ordered 34 lashes as a punishment, Pakistani news reports said.
The video, shot with cell phone, initially shows the girl, clad in an all-enveloping black burka, being held by bearded men while another begins striking her. She can be heard shouting for help in the Pashtu language, spoken by most locals in Swat, but is dragged away to another location, held down and flogged. Several dozen people can be seen looking on.
“For God’s sake, please stop, stop it,” the girl pleads as the whip falls. “I am dying.”
Off-camera, another militant gives orders: “Hold her feet tightly. Lift her burka a bit.”
A Taliban spokesman, Muslim Khan, defended the public lashing, saying the girl had engaged in immoral behavior he did not specify. “It happened two months ago, when we were at war with the government,” he said in Swat. But local people said the incident had taken place two weeks ago in the village of Kala Kalae.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani condemned the flogging and pledged an investigation. The government’s former information minister, Sherry Rehman, requested a special session of Parliament to discuss the incident.
“Such brutalities … cannot be allowed to take place under the leadership of a democratic government,” Rehman said. “We cannot leave our citizens at the mercy of militants who are murdering and maiming our people in the name of Islam.”
Insurgents in the valley, 100 miles north of Islamabad, the capital, struck a truce in February with Pakistani authorities. It called for the Taliban to cease hostilities and the government to permit the establishment of Islamic courts.
Jahangir called the flogging a harbinger that the country and its leaders must heed.
“This is not just the flogging of the girl; it is an indication of what is in store for us,” she said. “The Taliban are forcing their brand of Islam on us, and we have to resist that.”
Some Pakistani religious leaders defended the public whipping.
“The flogging is Islamic, and the punishment is written in the holy Quran,” Mufti Munibur Rehman, a leading Muslim scholar, said in a televised debate. “So how can we term it un-Islamic?”
Other influential religious figures, though, denounced the punishment. Amir Liquat Ali, who hosts a popular Islam-themed program on Geo television, called it barbaric.
Some provincial officials charged that it was unfair to portray the flogging as reflecting current conditions in Swat.
The Swat accord was reached between the government of the North-West Frontier Province and a cleric named Sufi Muhammad, whose son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah leads a Taliban army that for nearly two years had held off army and paramilitary troops seeking to regain control of Swat.
The alpine valley was once a tourist haven, with stunning mountain scenery and a ski resort, which the militants burned down.
Over the last two years, they also burned down nearly 200 schools providing education to girls and beheaded dozens of local officials and paramilitary troops, terrorizing anyone who dared speak out against them.
The central government was not a party to the peace accord but signaled its approval and pulled back army troops. The Swat deal was viewed with concern by Western governments, but Pakistani officials defended it as a way of stemming bloodshed in Swat and said the brand of Islamic law to be imposed was not a particularly harsh one.
The video reportedly was obtained by a documentary filmmaker named Samar Minallah, who said she received it from friends in Swat. It had been circulating in the valley for some days, she said.
Stations that aired the video preceded it with a warning that it contained graphic imagery and children should not be allowed to view it. Word of its existence quickly spread, with horrified Pakistanis from across the social spectrum text-messaging friends and urging them to watch it.
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