Minutes earlier, he had been stopped at a checkpoint in Kabul and forced to hand over his mobile phone for inspection. Mohammad was terrified – he knew the Taliban guard would find material on his phone that revealed his sexuality. “He started searching the gallery and photos and videos and gave me a really strong slap in the face.
He said you must have been fucked many times and started using really abusive words,” said Mohammad, a pseudonym used to protect his identity. “He said, ‘We’re going to hang you’,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Mohammad pulled his hair free from the fighter’s grip and ran, escaping into the scattering crowd as bullets flew overhead. “I’m very thankful that the crowd didn’t know what was going on,” he