“Like they don’t know why, but they are just trying to beat you, harm you, disrespect you. “Are you familiar with something we call sadism?” Barakzai asked me when we spoke recently. When they finished, she stood up, crying. The men jumped out of the truck and started whipping Barakzai with a rubber cable until she fell over, then continued whipping her. The men regularly drove around Kabul in pickup trucks, looking for Afghans to publicly shame and punish for violating their moral code. They were heading toward the pharmacy when a truckload of Taliban militants from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice pulled up beside them. they left the doctor’s office with a prescription. She asked her neighbor, another woman, to walk with her to the doctor in central Kabul. Its blue folds hid her fingertips, painted red in violation of the Taliban’s ban on nail polish. So she shaved her 2-year-old daughter’s head, dressed her in boys’ clothing to pass her off as a guardian, and slipped on a burka. Her husband was at work, and she had no sons. According to the Taliban’s rules, she needed a Maharram, a male guardian, in order to leave home to visit the doctor. One morning in the summer of 1999, Shukriya Barakzai woke up feeling dizzy and feverish.