The kidnap gang armed themselves with AK-47s and pistols for their mission, but this wasn’t a jihadist hostage-taking, or even the latest brutal convulsion of gang warfare. It was the operation to seize a 12-year-old girl, and her value was not for propaganda but for marriage.
As five men dragged Anjali from her home and into a car, she fought back, losing her chador and sandals. Like thousands of other Hindu girls in southern Pakistan, she had been targeted for forced conversion to Islam through marriage to a Muslim.
“A lot of people saw it happen,” said her father Kundan, 48, a disabled shopkeeper who was at work when the gang pounced at the family’s home in Daharki, a town 340 miles north of Karachi,