US Marines Save an Afghan Girl

[Conley]

The Afghan girl turned up one winter night at the Marine base with fist-sized bruises beginning to blossom across her body. Her name was Malika, and she looked about 16 years old, 17 at the most.

More worrisome to military medical staff than the abrasions on her battered shoulders was the vomiting. Malika had ingested rat poison or insecticide, apparently in despair over her situation.

Her brothers had accused her of having a romantic relationship with a boy she had hoped to marry. In southern Afghanistan, a deeply conservative and devout area of the country that spawned the militant Islamist Taliban movement, that amounted to a death sentence.

“Don’t let them kill me,” she pleaded. “If you send me back to Marjah, I’ll be dead.”

The Marines did not let her brothers kill her, or let her kill herself. What’s more, long after the Camp Pendleton command staff returned to San Diego County, they discovered this spring that she had done more than just survive. She had thrived.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/19/amid-war-marines-give-girl-new-hope/

Just one story of a life being saved in an unconventional way.

[Conley]

"Her troubles began years before, she told her foreign benefactors, when her father was killed in the war-torn province by a rival for her mother’s affections. Her mother was forced according to local custom to abandon her children when she remarried. That left Malika to be raised by her older brothers, whom she described as small-time drug peddlers of ill repute."

F'ing monsters.

[roadmaster]

Knowing people over there and here this is common.

[MMC]

Well.....most think those in the Miltiary are just about going to War to kill the enemy. Seems in every War or conflict you have the truth about how they also save lives and impact the lives of others for the better.

[ramone]

I'm not real big on saving people from a foreign place but when children are concerned it is a different story. These sand land backwards people make me want to puke when it comes to treatment of their women. While we revere our females, they degrade and cower theirs. I'd like to wrap them all in a pig skin and..........