What it's like being a woman in Afghanistan today: 'death in slow motion'
On early Monday morning, just before the break of dawn, a 23-year-old Afghan journalist packed her bags, said quiet goodbyes to her family and left her home in a carefully mapped and cautiously executed plan.
"My heart was beating so fast for the whole journey, till I reached a safe place. I was escaping the Taliban's brutality and I was afraid they would capture me," she shared. The journalist asked to be identified only with her initials – F.J. – because her family is still under Taliban surveillance inside Afghanistan.
She was escaping threats of a forced marriage with a local Taliban fighter in her district in northern Afghanistan and relocating to another country. "One of their commanders who was only being referred to as '' [a title given to a religious leader] demanded that my parents marry me to him. They
