When the Taliban gained control of the country in the 1990s they criminalized all sexual relationships outside of a traditional heterosexual marriage, and would often publicly execute men and women for committing fornication and adultery and for engaging in sodomy. In 1994 Mullah Omar saved a boy from being sodomized by two feuding generals in Kandahar and when he was subsequently given control of the city he decreed that violent and consensual sodomy would be capital crimes [1].