Taliban Kidnap 18 South Koreans in Afghanistan
They were members of a church group, and readers may recall other church groups from South Korea have also ventured into some very dangerous places.
Taliban gunmen abducted at least 18 members of a South Korean church group in southern Afghanistan, and a purported spokesman for the Islamic militia said Friday it will question them about their activities in Afghanistan before deciding their fate.
The Koreans were seized Thursday in Ghazni province as they were traveling by bus from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar, said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police chief.
“We are investigating, who are they, what are they doing in Afghanistan,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported Taliban spokesman, told The Associated Press by satellite telephone. “After our investigation, the Taliban higher authorities will make a decision about their fate. Right now they are safe and sound.”
The South Koreans’ bus driver, released late Thursday, said there were 18 women and five men on the bus, Ahmadzai said. The Taliban spokesman said 15 women and three men were seized. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified. [AP, Amir Shah]
Let’s all hope these people get home safely, so we can ask them what the hell they were doing there.
See also:
* Would the Muslim world be so tense if this fatwa had gained wider acceptance?
Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together–a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. [Foreign Policy]
I don’t really know if I want to touch that one, beyond imagining the lawsuits if anyone suggested that here.
* I hate them even more than Illinois Nazis, but you can’t deny that they’re the terminus of a logical progression that has considerable cross-DMZ appeal. Others have noticed, too. Leaving aside the superficial question of fashion, these guys have an uncomfortable proximity to the mainstream of their society.
* Rumors of Kim Jong Il’s failing health continue to spread among North Koreans. In a society where news is so controlled, the mere propogation of rumor has a significance detached from their veracity. That said, I hope the rumors are true that we’ll be rid of Kim Jong Il sooner rather than later. As unpopular as I suspect Kim Jong Il to be in most segments of North Korean society, his death would be an irrecoverable loss to the regime’s ideological cohesion.
* Michael Yon has a moving post about former enemies turning their guns on al Qaeda and experimenting with self-government. They’re not laying down their arms; better, they’re agreeing to point them at the right people, put on uniforms, and become a part of their country’s still-rickety security structure. The experiment is clearly fragile, and Iraq’s current leadership may not be up to the task. A new round of elections may even be in order. Still, this kind of Sunni participation in Iraqi self-government and its attendant restoration of security is an absolute prerequisite to any non-genocidal resolution of Shiite-Sunni differences.
Update:
Those South Koreans who ventured into Taliban territory have inadvertently hastened the apocalypse by creating rare agreement between me and Joseph Steinberg, though his use of the word “traitor” is a predictable excess. My sympathy for these folks just declined by at least half. It’s one thing to push against the boundaries of medieval intolerance, but it’s another thing entirely to throw yourself at its mercy and then expect to be ransomed out or exchanged for Taliban thugs who would go free to murder again. If the actions of these people were as courageous as I was willing to assume, then they assumed that risk. Not surprisingly for Roh Moo Hyun, he speaks and acts as though he’d gladly pay ransom or meet the terrorists’ demands if could. Roh thus helps to assure that there will be more hostages and beheadings in the future.
Still, I can’t understand why some people seem so gleeful about this. Over at the Marmot’s Hole, the venom of some of the comments is just hard to understand without engaging in amateur psychology. The hostages have quickly become surrogates for some pretty powerful anti-Christian sentiment. What’s striking about the discussion is that the Taliban’s murder, kidnapping, intolerance, and ignorance never even became a subject. It was lost among the venom directed at the victims. I grant that these Koreans don’t seem to be adherents of an especially open-minded or intellectual strain of Christianity, and Christianity in Korea can seem annoyingly messianic to a non-believer (worst example: an obnoxious attempt to convert my wife at her mother’s funeral). In the comments below, I’ve conceded the possibility that the missionaries’ motives were more psychological than altruistic, depending on what they were actually doing there.
But let’s keep some perspective here. At worst, the missionaries practiced a far more benign form of fanaticism than their captors. So why are the Taliban getting off without a scratch in this discussion? One commenter actually compares them to bad weather. What a neat trick the Taliban have managed here: they are scoring propaganda points against the South Korean and Afghan governments without even being judged responsible for their terrorist actions. Are these evil human beings, or were these missionaries kidnapped by wild bears that were hanging around their garbage cans? And if the distinction doesn’t matter, then can we start euthanizing the ones we capture without a lot of fuss from the Human Rights Industry?