Allai, Pakistan – Afzal Kohistani had lost hope of ever getting the security he needed. The last time he approached the police in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad for protection, they dragged him inside the police station and beat him for hours.

Weeks later, the 30-year-old was back in Abbottabad for another hearing in a case that he had single-handedly kept alive for seven years, after the murders of at least three women and three of Afzal’s brothers over a matter of “honour”.

Soon, he would be the latest victim, a manifestation of the high, and incessant, cost of attempting to extract justice in cases involving so-called honour crimes in Pakistan, which have claimed at least 4,900 lives since 2012, according to data from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

Afzal hails from the Palas valley, in the remote northern Pakistani region of Kohistan, about 350km by road from the capital Islamabad. Strictly conservative cultural traditions are enforced in the region through tribal councils known as “jirgas”.

In 2012, two of Afzal‘s brothers appeared in a video alongside four women, singing and dancing in a small room during a wedding. The women – Begum Jan, Shireen Jan, Bazigha and Amna – sat in a line, clapping in time to the music as Bin Yasir filmed them, and Gul Nazar danced by himself in a corner.

When the video leaked into public knowledge, a jirga was ordered. The boys and girls were from different tribes and, as such, their meeting was forbidden under local custom.

Javed Azadkhel, a local Muslim leader from the girl’s Azadkhel tribe headed the meeting, and declared that both the men and women must be killed. (The leader refused to be interviewed for this story, but denied any wrongdoing in comments by telephone.)

Afzal, fearing for his brothers’ lives, made his way to Islamabad, holding a press conference outside the Supreme Court in May 2012, demanding the men and women’s lives be protected.

A week later, he reported the women had been killed. His two brothers, meanwhile, had fled into hiding.

Since then, Afzal had pursued the case at every level – with the police, government bodies and through the courts, attempting to have the perpetrators arrested and his family given protection. In 2013, three of his elder brothers – not the ones in the video – were shot dead when gunmen from the girls’ tribe ambushed them outside a mosque.

He had come to Abbottabad – about 145km from the remote village where his family has lived in hiding for seven years – for yet another hearing, as the case continued to wind through Pakistan’s labyrinthine court system.

In the course of the court proceedings, the Azadkhel admitted in November that three of the women were killed, but claimed it was done by a family member, Shamsuddin, who himself was killed in 2018.

On the evening of March 6, in the busy Sarban market, where you can buy everything from school bags to dried fruit, Afzal hailed a Suzuki pick-up van and got in the back. Alongside him was his nephew Faiz-ur-Rehman, who often accompanied him on these trips to court for protection.

Afzal took out his phone and spoke to Nazar, his brother, briefly, before browsing through Facebook, waiting for the van to depart. There were no other passengers.

Minutes later, eyewitnesses heard at least four shots ring out. Faiz ran out of the vehicle, firing Afzal’s pistol into the air before chasing after the three men he says attacked them. He was arrested with a gun in his hand while appearing to police to be fleeing the crime scene, minutes later.

Afzal Kohistani lay in a pool of blood in the van, already dead.

‘We have nothing left’

Gul Nazar, 28, a slim but robustly built young man with thick, dark brown hair, is seven years older but unmistakably the same face as was seen in the grainy wedding video.

“Faiz was sent there for Afzal’s safety. A nephew is like a son – how can a son kill his father?” he asks, alleging three men, Abdul Hameed, Mausam Khan and Habib-ur-Rehman, from the girls’ tribe carried out the attack.

Police told Al Jazeera Mausam Khan is in custody, and they are continuing to search for the other two.

“[Afzal] screamed in every corner of Pakistan, he knocked on every door. But he got no justice,” says Nazar, sitting in the small three-room concrete and tin-roofed house outside a small village in the Allai valley, where the family has been hiding out since 2012.

“And now he has been killed. And now we say the same thing: there is a danger to us, there is a danger to our family.”

Back in the village in Kohistan, he says, the perpetrators have been boasting about the killing.

“They are telling everyone. They are enjoying it. They say that Afzal was a difficult target, because he was interacting with the state. If we can kill him, killing the rest [of us] is easy.”

Nazar lives with Bin Yasir, the other brother in the video, and their eldest brother Gul Shahzad in the ramshackle home, little more than a hut perched on a mountainside with no running water, electricity or heating.

In all, 44 people live in the cramped quarters, including his brothers’ five widows and all of their children.

For years, Afzal had managed to get donations and funds to the family to keep the household going. The other brothers are too afraid to leave their home, certain that betraying their location or identity would lead to an attack.

Nazar and Yasir were studying in Mansehra when the jirga’s decision was announced. They have not been home since, and never completed their degrees.

“I can’t even go to the bazaar, or to the road to do a day’s manual labour,” says Nazar.

Bin Yasir, 25, says he fears for the family’s future and is uncertain how they will make ends meet without Afzal’s help.

“We are not able to provide for ourselves or our families,” he said. ‘We are living imprisoned in our home for seven years. Afzal was still finding a way to make things work, but now … we have nothing left, and we don’t know how to continue surviving.”

In the small courtyard where the women of the family prepare food each day, a child screams happily as he plays with a plastic tricycle. The eight women and 21 daughters of the household, meanwhile, remain sequestered in a small room for the duration of Al Jazeera’s visit.

Insiders, outsiders and controlling women

“This very feudal and tribal nature of patriarchy, it really sees women as property or a sexual object, as belonging to men,” says Farzana Bari, a rights activist who travelled to Afzal‘s village twice in 2012 on judicial fact-finding missions.

She said on the second occasion, locals presented two “imposters” for questioning, claiming they were the women in the video. A later mission by a judge, Shoaib Khan, reported the same thing occurring.

Facial recognition analysis on one of the girls carried out by the UK-based Digital Barriers, done at the request of activists in 2013, bears this assertion out, saying it was unlikely the woman the missions met was the one in the video.

Nazish Brohi, a researcher who focuses on gender, says the complicity of the community in covering up the crime comes from a division between what villagers consider to be insiders and outsiders, and the fact that policing women’s behaviour and bodies is considered a subject only to be arbitrated by the community itself.

“They are happy for the state to secure the street, but they certainly don’t want the state talking about domestic violence and coming into the home,” she says.

“The silence, that comes from the fact that even if they are from a different tribe or family, they share the same world view, principles, beliefs and ethical universe. In that sense, they know that they are coming at it from within the same internal logic of the [village’s moral] framework.”

Bari argues the subjugation of women and the policing of their bodies and movements – whether in Kohistan or elsewhere – stems from an economic base.

“Male domination has a very material base of controlling women and women’s labour,” she says. “Women are free domestic labour at home. That status quo, no man wants to dismantle. There is a dividend of patriarchy which every male enjoys.”

Brohi agrees, but argues while the economic base is changing in Pakistan, social structures such as strictly conservative tribal customs are slow to catch up.

“Economic structures have changed and evolved, but the superstructures haven’t caught up,” she says. “What we are seeing is a moment of disconnect, with social systems trying to catch up with economic realities.”

Brohi argues when the economy was purely agrarian, it was a choice of collaborating or starving. That led to collectivised senses of identity, as opposed to looking at rights as being derived at the individual level.

“When a woman decides to run away with her lover, it’s not just her own body she is making a decision about, because in rural Pakistan even now marriage is a tool of governance. In that context, where people are creating their own configurations, one person acting on their own disrupts the whole system.”

After the women were killed, Gul Nazar says, the Azadkhel tribe held a jirga, inviting members of other clans to witness what they had done, just as they boasted of killing his brother Afzal years later.

For sociologist Saadia Toor, who studies gender and power relations, that fact is not surprising, because acts meant to restore “honour” must be public to have that effect.

“[The punishment] reproduces the social code,” she says. “It is not just about punishing the transgressor, but it is about having the punishment serve as a lesson to everyone else, that this is what happens when you break the social code. That has to be public for it to work.”

‘Impossible to escape’

At least 419 people were killed over issues of “honour” across Pakistan last year, according to HRCP data on reported cases. That number is down from at least 919 killings in 2012, the year the Kohistan video case occurred.

Despite Afzal’s murder, his family says they will not stop fighting for justice for their brothers and the women who were killed. 

“We are not willing to compromise on [opposing these jirgas],” said Muhammad Ishaq, Kohistani’s cousin, at a recent meeting with Pakistan’s National Commission of Human Rights.

“They shot Afzal. They can shoot me 100 times, but we will not compromise on this,” he said, his eyes flashing with anger.

Bari, however, fears that statement may be too close to the truth.

“Nothing will happen. This boy [Faiz] will remain in jail. Possibly these two boys, if they are not protected, they will also be killed. And there will be silence. No one will talk about it, and it will be forgotten.”

For Gul Nazar, too, all these years after the video first emerged, there is a sense there is no escaping his society’s retribution.

“It is completely impossible to escape. Six years is a short time – it could be 100 years and the same thing would happen.

“If we fall into their hands, they won’t leave a single one of us alive.”

Outside, the rain falls gently on Afzal Kohistani’s grave.

Asad Hashim is Al Jazeera’s digital correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim.

Washington, DC – US officials including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with more than a dozen US lawmakers appeared on stage on the second day of AIPAC’s annual conference to vow support for Israel as it responded to an alleged rocket attack by Hamas with air strikes on Gaza.

Pence listed the policy moves President Donald Trump has taken to support Israel drawing applause from about 18,000 attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee gathering.

“Under President Donald Trump, if the world knows nothing else the world knows this: America stands with Israel,” Pence said.

Trump, meeting at the White House with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, signed a declaration recognising Israeli control of the Golan Heights.

“President Trump also promised to shut down the PLO office in Washington if the Palestinian Authority didn’t promise to take immediate steps to stop funding terrorists who murder innocent Israeli civilians with American tax dollars and, when the PLO refused, President Trump shut their office down,” Pence said.

“When President Trump promised to cut off funding to anti-Israel agencies at the United Nations, he meant it. And last year, the United States ended all US contributions to UNRA,” the vice president said.

“Beyond all that, the president promised to stand up to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, and he withdrew the United States of America from the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. There will be no more pallets of cash to the mullahs in Iran,” Pence said.

“Last year President Trump did what no American president for the last 20 years had the courage to do when he moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, the capital of the state of Israel,” Pence said.

Rising anti-Semitism

Referring to Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of Israel”, Pompeo recounted his recent visit to Israel when he became the first US secretary of state to visit the Western Wall with an Israeli prime minister.

Pompeo warned of rising anti-Semitism worldwide in the Middle East, Europe and the US. “The United States stands with the Jewish people and Israel in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry,” Pompeo said.

“My friends, let me go on record, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” Pompeo said, drawing applause.

Following the alleged Hamas rocket attack in Israel on Monday, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley criticised the United Nations and other Western nations for failing to support Israel at such moments.

“What’s interesting is, at the UN, I can guarantee you it is radio silent. They are not saying anything about Hamas,” Haley said. “But if it was any one of those countries they’d be calling an emergency Security Council meeting.”

Condemning Hamas

Representative Elliot Engel of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and other foreign affairs leaders in the House and Senate are circulating a “Dear colleague” letter condemning Hamas to demonstrate unwavering US support, Engel said.

“The US-Israel relationship has to remain strong,” Engel said. “It is good to see so many AIPAC activists because we want to take that message to Capitol Hill.”

AIPAC members are poised to visit members of Congress in their offices in the US Capitol on Tuesday.

Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said she expects Congress to approve a $3.8bn aid package for Israel, especially she said, with support from AIPAC members who will be lobbying their members of Congress on Tuesday.

“There are 18,000 citizens of the United States of America who are here. And when you come to our offices, you understand the issues, you are well prepared, so you have the respect of members. Sometimes there are disagreements, but when you come and share the facts, there is support from both sides of the aisle because you know what you are talking about,” Lowey said.

Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican on Appropriations, said support for Israel in the Congress has always been bipartisan and the rocket attack should be seen as evidence to the imperative for continuing support.

“Just look at what happened this morning. It couldn’t be more timely,” Granger said. “It is proof that you can never ever let your guard down.”

‘Deeply disturbed’

Organisers of the AIPAC conference assembled a series of panel events to promote the idea that support for Israel is bipartisan among Democrats and Republicans, even as some Republican speakers drew applause for condemning Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who has criticised AIPAC.

“I am deeply disturbed by some in the Congress who are threatening this alliance. I don’t think I’ve seen this in the 15 years that I’ve been in the Congress and don’t have a tolerance for that,” said Representative Michael McFaul, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee.

“I just think we have a duty and an obligation to denounce anti-Semitism in all of its forms,” McFaul said.

The AIPAC conference is happening at a time when there is a widening political divide in the US over the Israel-Palestine conflict. Americans, particularly on the left, are increasingly unhappy with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

None of the Democrats seeking the party’s 2020 presidential nomination were scheduled to appear at the conference. The progressive US grassroots political organisation MoveOn urged Democrats to #skipAIPAC.

Other US politicians from both parties who appeared on AIPAC’s stage included: Top House Republican Kevin McCarthy, freshman members of the House of Representatives David Trone, Elaine Luria, Dan Crenshaw, Susie Lee, and Denver Riggleman and Senators Tammy Duckworth, Martha McSally, Kyrsten Sinema, and Jim Risch.

“BDS is pure unadulterated racism,” said Risch, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His comments echoed others at the conference who condemned the pro-Palestinian-rights BDS movement that advocates boycotts, divestiture and sanctions on Israel in order to pressure the nation to change its policies.

The Trump administration on Monday said it supports a federal judge’s ruling that the entire Affordable Care Act should be scrapped, signaling a shift in the Justice Department’s position and alarming Democrats who vowed to oppose the move.

“The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed,” three Justice Department lawyers wrote to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now considering the case. “[T]he United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed.”

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The GOP-led states that initially brought the lawsuit, Texas v. United States, had called for the entire law to be invalidated because Congress eliminated its individual insurance mandate penalty — an argument that swayed U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee.

The Trump administration had previously argued that only elements of the ACA, like its protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, should be struck down but that other parts of the law could stand.

House Democrats — who had separately planned to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would fortify Obamacare — denounced the Trump administration’s new legal position as “unconscionable.”

“Millions of Americans will lose their health care immediately if this decision is upheld,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement. “We will do everything we can to defeat this attempt to rip away Americans’ health care.”

Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said the department “has determined that the district court’s comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal.”

A group of Democratic-led states led by California is challenging the ruling, arguing that the federal health care law can remain in place even without a tax penalty for Americans who forego health coverage.

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British lawmakers seized a measure of control over the stalled Brexit process from Prime Minister Theresa May’s foundering government, setting up a series of votes that could dramatically alter the course of the UK’s departure from the European Union.

The move on Monday came after May conceded that Parliament would defeat her twice-rejected divorce deal with the EU again if she put it to a third vote.

With Brexit delayed and the new departure date up in the air, the House of Commons voted to give itself control of the parliamentary timetable starting on Wednesday so lawmakers can vote on alternatives to May’s withdrawal deal. The government usually controls the scheduling of votes in Parliament.

Lawmakers who backed Monday’s motion, which passed 329-302, hope the planned “indicative votes” will narrow the options down to one that can secure majority support. Possible options include a “soft Brexit” that maintains close economic ties with the EU or scrapping Britain’s departure altogether.

Several government ministers quit their posts so they could back the motion. The government opposed the measure because it gave lawmakers temporary control of the parliamentary agenda, usually the government’s prerogative.

‘Dangerous’

The government said it was disappointed in the vote, claiming it “upends the balance between our democratic institutions and sets a dangerous, unpredictable precedent for the future”.

But it also conceded the new votes might be a way to break the months-long Brexit impasse. May said she would “engage constructively” with the results of the process, though she said she was sceptical it would produce a decisive result.

Earlier in the day, May acknowledged “with great regret” that her deal still lacked “sufficient support” to be approved as of Monday.

She said she hoped to hold a third vote on the agreement later this week and was working to build support for the deal, which sets out the terms of withdrawing from the EU and the outline of future relations with the bloc.

May warned opponents that continuing to reject the deal her government negotiated last year could lead to a “slow Brexit” that postpones the country’s departure indefinitely.

Cliff-edge departure

With the March 29 Brexit day set almost two years ago days away and the withdrawal agreement lacking Parliament’s approval, European leaders agreed to a postponement last week to avoid a chaotic cliff-edge departure. There is wide concern that Britain leaving without a deal would be disruptive for the world’s biggest trading bloc and deeply damaging for its ex-member country.

However, the EU granted a shorter delay than May sought. It said if Parliament approves the proposed divorce deal, the UK would leave the EU on May 22. If not, the government has until April 12 to tell the 27 remaining EU countries what it plans to do – leave without a deal, cancel Brexit or chart a path to a new option.

In agreeing to the postponement, European leaders hoped Britain’s deadlocked politicians would find a solution to the crisis. But the EU isn’t counting on it. The European Commission said Monday it had completed planning for a no-deal Brexit, calling that outcome “increasingly likely”.

May stands little chance of getting the deal she struck with the EU approved unless she can win over Brexit-backing lawmakers in her Conservative Party and its Northern Irish ally, the Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP said Monday the party’s “position remains unchanged”.

May has come under intense pressure to quit the prime minister’s post as the price of winning support for the deal.

At a meeting Sunday at the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, prominent Brexiteers told May they might back the deal – if she agreed to step down so a new leader could take charge of the next phase of negotiations, which deals with Britain’s future relations with the EU.

Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who attended the meeting and is likely to be a contender in any future Conservative leadership race, accused the government of lacking “gumption” and chickening out on delivering Brexit.

Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun, put a call on its front page for the prime minister to resign under the headline “Time’s up, Theresa.”

‘Death Star of politics’

May is hanging on, hoping she can persuade Brexit-backing lawmakers that rejecting her deal means Britain may never leave the EU.

She told lawmakers that Britain would not leave the EU without a deal unless Parliament – which has already rejected the idea – voted for it.

She added cancelling Brexit “must not happen” while “a slow Brexit” that involved a long delay to Britain’s departure “is not a Brexit that will bring the British people together”.

Opponents of Brexit feel the political tide may be turning in their favour. Hundreds of thousands of people marched through London on Saturday calling for a new referendum on whether to leave the EU or remain.

“Brexit is like the Death Star of politics,” Conservative legislator George Freeman said. “I always feared it would be like this. It’s destroying and soaking up all the prime minister’s room for manoeuvre and political goodwill.

“I’ve never known this country so divided, so angry and in such a dangerous state,” he said.