Afghanistan's Romeo & Juliet: The true story of two young Afghans who risked death by defying their families and their culture to be together.

• Author: Nordland, Rod
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Her name was Zakia. Shortly before midnight on the freezing-cold night of March 20, 2014, she lay fully clothed on her thin mattress on a concrete floor and considered what she was about to do.

She had on all her layers--a long dress with leggings under it, a ragged pink sweater, and an orange-and-purple scarf--but no coat, because she didn't own one. Her 4-inch open-toed high heels were beside her mattress next to the photograph of Ali, the boy she loved. It was not the best escape gear for what she was about to do--climb a wall and ran off into the mountains in central Afghanistan--but it would soon be her wedding day, and she wanted to look good.

That night was not the first time Zakia had contemplated escaping from the Bamiyan Women's Shelter. She had been in the shelter for the past six months, since the day she ran away from home, hoping to marry Ali.

As an 18-year-old and an adult, she had the legal right to wed. But as happens with so many Afghan girls, her family had denied her the right to choose who to marry--and threatened her with death for daring to defy her father. When an Afghan girl has done something culturally forbidden, it's considered acceptable--expected even--for her male relatives to kill her to wipe clean the shame brought to the family; it's called an honor killing.

Zakia knew that soon her family would succeed in its legal efforts to have her removed from the women's shelter, and she expected to be killed if that happened. So she was determined to escape and elope with Ali.

A Daring Escape

On the other side of the Bamiyan valley, Ali was waiting for Zakia's call. Several weeks earlier, when he visited the women's shelter, Ali had secretly left Zakia a cellphone with which to contact him. He had had to teach her how to use it: Zakia couldn't read or even recognize the numbers zero to nine to dial on a phone.

To escape the shelter that night, Zakia dragged several mattresses across the courtyard to the back wall. She doubled them over and piled them up to make a ledge high enough to climb over the 8-foot wall. Once over the wall, she ran in her high heels until she was far enough away to call Ali.

When Ali got the call, he sprang into action. A friend who owned a battered Toyota Corolla had agreed to help the couple elope by taking him to pick up Zakia, about 20 minutes away, and then driving them up into the mountains. When Zakia got into the car with Ali, she took his hand in hers. It was a shockingly intimate gesture in a society as conservative as Afghanistan.

Late the following day, they paid a mullah (an Islamic religious leader) to marry them. But getting married didn't solve their problems; it only created new ones.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. Since the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, it has endured close to four decades of upheaval. The Russians withdrew after 10 years, but then rival Afghan warlords continued to fight. In 1996, a radical Islamic group known as the Taliban took control of the country and enforced a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, especially with regard to women. They banned girls from going to school and women from going to work.

But the oppression of women was a big part of Afghan society long before the Taliban. After the American-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban in October 2001 (see "America's Longest War," below), the laws restricting women so harshly were repealed, but that did little to change attitudes. For example, honor killings are illegal on paper. But in reality, they're just one of many abusive customs toward women and girls that remain common, including child marriages and wife beating.

Afghanistan is also a deeply tribal society, and marriages between different ethnic groups are frowned on. This was another reason Zakia's father opposed her marriage to Ali. Zakia is Tajik, and Ali is Hazara. To make matters worse, she's a Sunni Muslim, and he's a Shiite Muslim, and their sects have been in violent conflict for centuries.

Their forbidden relationship had started years earlier, across a low mud wall that divided their families' adjacent potato fields. "We were children and...