Taliban evict women from villages ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Urya saw the soldiers of the Taliban religious army approaching her village, a cluster of mud-brown homes in the middle of a battlefield in Afghanistan. Her husband, loyal to anti-Taliban forces, had fled already, and she quickly gathered some clothes and food in an effort to escape with her children. It was too late. Urya was bundled into a pickup truck packed with women and they were started on a journey that took many of them to Pakistan. The United Nations estimates as many as 20,000 women and children were evicted from their homes last month after the Islamic militia swept across the Shomali plains north of the capital, Kabul. The fertile fields of the Shomali have changed hands many times since the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, but this was the first time the villages were forcibly cleared of civilians. "There emerges a systematic pattern of men arrested, a few killed, and women and children separated and put in buses," Radhika Coomaraswamy, a special U.N. envoy investigating violence against women, said last week. Taliban leaders have accused the villages of supporting their enemies. But Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, head of the Taliban ruling council, denied in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan that his men forcibly relocated the area's residents. Women who found shelter in neighboring Pakistan told a different story, often weeping softly as they recounted being threatened by Taliban militiamen or seeing houses going up in flames.
