Sickening images show two men being paraded through an Afghanistan street with their faces tarred black — and being pulled by nooses around their necks.
“Taliban accused these men of theft, their faces were colored with black color — to embarrass them,” tweeted Bilal Sarwary, one of Afghanistan’s leading journalists, who said he was sent the images late last week.
The photos show the unidentified pair surrounded by a mob of heavily armed men, many punching the air in apparent celebration as others hold assault rifles aloft.
The men’s faces were both completely blackened, seemingly with a tar-like substance, and both had nooses tight around the neck, which was pulled by at least one in the mob, the images show.
“This was after the Friday prayers inside Herat city,” Sarwary also tweeted, with a video of the parade showing dozens of supposed Taliban supporters marching alongside the accused thieves.
“Taliban style Justice often means hands of thieves are chopped off,” the journalist noted.
“This is medieval and barbaric,” wrote one of Sarwary’s followers. “I cannot believe this is happening now and I weep with sadness and with shame.”
The sickening sight came as Herat, a city of about 600,000 people near the border with Iran, was left like a “ghost town,” provincial council member Ghulam Habib Hashimi told Reuters. “Families have either left or are hiding in their homes.”
The parade appeared further proof that the Taliban were already returning to the extreme version of Islamic Sharia law that the US invasion previously appeared to have crushed.
The Taliban notoriously imposed strict punishments under their initial rule, including stoning suspected adulterers and carrying out public executions.
Many of the harshest restrictions were against women, many of whom were raped and forced into arranged marriages, as well as being forbidden from jobs or schooling and forced to be subservient to men.
After the US invasion, women finally started finding freedom — something seemingly already being erased by the Taliban as reports emerge of them ejecting women from their workplaces and forcing girls as young as 12 to marry militants.
As the insurgents took control of the presidential palace in Kabul early Sunday, a photo circulated on social media showing someone painting over posters depicting women.
“This is a new dark era for women,” tweeted activist and former beauty queen Sarah Idan, who shared the images and blamed “radical Islamist misogynists Taliban.”
