You may not know her name but you’ve probably seen her face, after her nose had been cut . That wasn’t how Aesha Mohammadzai was born, mind you, but it was her punishment for attempting to leave an abusive marriage.

Aesha’s heinous ordeal was the direct result of the Islamic culture in Afghanistan but you would not get that by reading an otherwise informative piect at the Daily Mail’s website:

Her plastic surgery had to be delayed because it was thought she was still not yet emotionally stable to cope with the painful and lengthy surgery required.

Psychologist Shiphra Bakhchi, 31, who has helped treat the 22-year-old for post-traumatic stress disorder believes the trauma of her disfigurement may have caused deeper mental scars than physical ones.

‘I really hope at some point she’ll be a functioning young lady that had a terrible trauma,’ the private practitioner told CNN.

When Aesha was 12, her father promised her in marriage to a Taliban fighter to pay a debt. She was handed over to his family who abused her and forced her to sleep in the stable with the animals.

The UN estimates that nearly 90 percent of Afghanistan’s women suffer from some sort of domestic abuse.

When she attempted to flee, she was caught and her nose and ears were hacked off by her husband as punishment.

‘When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out. In the middle of the night it felt like there was cold water in my nose.

‘I opened my eyes and I couldn’t even see because of all the blood,’ she told CNN reporter Atia Abawi.

90 percent of Afghanistan’s women suffer from domestic abuse? Hmmmm. Let’s see, what culture is the prevailing culture in Afghanistan?

To most of us, the elephant in the living room not mentioned in the article is the religion that spawned Aesha’s disfigurement; that would be Islam. Yet, neither the word “Islam” nor “Muslim” appears in the article.

Another point to keep in mind is that there are countless victims who suffer fates as bad or worse than Aesha’s whose screams are never heard by anyone other than their barbaric persecutors.

h/t WZ

Ben Barrack is a talk show host and author of the upcoming book, Unsung Davids