In 2001 Mullah Omar's bodyguard explained the macabre delight that the Taliban took in creatively torturing Afghanis who tried to extract even the smallest pleasures from life:

Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat - until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died. We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions. Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.

Repressing human sexuality is pretty much the definition of an impossible totalitarian project. The more brutal the repression, the more it guarantees symptomatic and sometimes pathological outbursts. Sometimes the rebellions happen as surreptitiously and normally as possible - Iran's gay and straight underground clubs are probably good examples of this. But other times the repression is so severe that sexuality gets expressed in only the angriest and most brutal ways - ergo the epidemics of homosexual and heterosexual rape during the Muslim-led anti-Soviet war. And in between, you get expressions of sexuality that go from the stubborn to the surreal.

After the jump - where these photos came from, how they got published, and the European left's oh-so-predictable reaction.