KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, July 22 (UPI) -- A 10-year-old Afghan girl possibly faces death at the hands of her family after being raped by a mullah in a mosque.
The mullah claims he thought she was older and that she consented to sex, but a medical exam showed the girl was violently raped. It was so violent that it caused a break in her fistula, the barrier between a woman's vagina and her rectum.
The situation worsened last Tuesday when the police removed the girl from the Women for Afghan Women shelter that gave her refuge and turned her over to her family who are openly planning to carry out an "honor killing." The mullah, Mohammad Amin, has offered to take the girl as his wife rather than have her killed.
The woman who helped her, Dr. Hassina Sarwari, has been facing death threats from other mullahs and the girl's family after she took her to the shelter.
"They call me and curse me, and threaten to kill me and my family, and say they know where I live," Sarwari told the New York Times. "They say, once your American husbands leave Afghanistan, we will do what we want to you."
Her husband is an Afghan doctor and war veteran, but Sarwari said the assumptions are not new.
"People know this office as the Americans' office," she said. "They all think the shelter is an American shelter. There isn't a single American here."
Sarwari, fearing for her life, wants to flee. The Women for Afghan Women organization said the girl cried for her family before the police turned her over and no one could bring themselves to tell her that they were planning to kill her.
