Pak woman publicly flogged by Taliban yet to get over her horror and humiliation

ISLAMABAD - Nearly two years after the Taliban left Pakistan’s Swat district, life seems to have returned to normalcy, but a woman named Saira Bibi still seethes with pain and anger remembering how she was flogged by the militants during their rule.

The Scotsman quoted Bibi as saying that despite being covered by a burka and staying all day at her house, she was dragged from home and flogged her in front of her neighbours over an accusation that she was an adulteress.

“They took me to the school, where 150 or 200 people had been gathered. They hit me 15 times,” she added.

Bibi is one of the first women to openly speak about being publicly punished during the Pakistani Taleban’s rule of the area, where girls were banned from going to schools, women from markets and executed anyone who resisted, the paper said.

However life is starting to get back to normal in Swat, and schoolgirls are once again flocking the streets of the main city, Mingora. Veiled women shop for food and clothes, and most of the two million who fled have returned, it added.

“Our enrolment is increasing,” Anwar Sultan, principal of the state-run Saidu Sharif girls’ high school in Mingora, said. (ANI)