By: Farhad Kohistani
Translated By: Mohammad sakhi Rezaie
With the identification of the Taliban based on the first period of this group’s rule in Afghanistan and its 20-year war with the citizens during the republic government, the possibility of any demeaning and inhuman treatment by this group is imagined, the most important of which is trampling on the human identity of women and in the worst case scenario, rape and kill them. In the past year and a half, there have been many reports of sexual assaults by Taliban forces on women in the media, and I have collected some of them here.
Independent Persian: On 23 January, 2022, the Farsi Independent reported on the Taliban’s gang rape of female prisoners and other violence inflicted on them in prison. In this report, the situation of the women’s rights protesting prisoners, including men and women, in the National Security Detention Center and Balkh Prison has been discussed. Men and women who were arrested during women’s protest marches on the 16th and 17th of September ,2021, in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the center of Balkh. They included 40 girls and 30 boys.
One of the women’s rights activists in Balkh told the Farsi Independent that after the release of the girls from the Taliban prison, she met at least four of them. In this report, she said that the detained girls have experienced a terrible situation both in prison and after their release. She has said that the girls were tortured and gang-raped many times in prison. The source said: “The girls told me that in the National Security Detention Center, a woman stripped them completely and tortured them with electric batons and whips. This woman forcefully fed these girls psychedelic pills, and then the Taliban gang-raped them.”
In this report, quoting another source, it is stated that the arrested girls were interrogated and tortured for one week in the building of the fourth security district of the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif, and for two weeks in the detention center of the National Security Directorate of this group in Mazar-e-Sharif, and then, they have been transferred to Mazar-e-Sharif women’s prison.
The report also states that the bodies of eight detainees, including women and boys, were found in the suburbs of Mazar-e-Sharif a few days after their arrest, and five protesting girls were killed by their families after being released from prison.
On September 10, 2921, the Etilaatroz reported the rape of a woman by Taliban forces in Khawak area of Panjshir. Roz information, referring to the audio tape obtained from the conversation between two Taliban officials in Panjshir, wrote: “Maulavi Aminul Haq, a member of the commission for handling complaints against Taliban soldiers and the head of the urban court of this group in Panjshir, in this audio tape tells his audience, a person with the last name Ziai, that the case of Taliban members raping a woman in Khawak is true. Aminul Haq said that “six members of the Taliban have been arrested on the charge of raping this woman; But one of them has confessed to committing this crime and the other five are accomplices.”
The Voice of Afghanistan news agency reported on 8 September 2021 that Taliban forces sexually assaulted female prisoners in Ghor, and when these women complained to the Taliban prison authorities, their complaints were ignored. Voice of Afghanistan news agency quoted one of the female prisoners released from Ghor prison, writing that “Tamna (fake name), says that Taliban forces enter women’s bedrooms at night and forcibly rape them.” Tamna said that a number of Taliban commanders also take female prisoners out of prison and rape them. This former prisoner in Ghor prison says that a Taliban commander sexually assaulted a 20-year-old girl in the prison of this province, and one night after this incident, this girl hanged herself and ended her life. “Taliban officials hid this crime and the perpetrator of this rape was not punished.” Tamna said that “Taliban commanders go to the women’s rooms during the days and monitor the acceptable women in order to go to their beds in the middle of the nights or ask the imprisoned women to come to them.”
Amu TV has reported that Taliban forces have sexually assaulted two young girls living in the west of Kabul city. Amu quoted these girls and wrote that the Taliban forces first kidnapped them from inside the city and then raped them. These two girls, who are both residents of the Dasht Barchi region in the west of Kabul and are from the Hazara tribe, have refused to reveal their real identities in the report due to the fear of their families’ lives.
Quoting from one of these victims, who is 18 years old and was an 11th grade student before the Taliban returned to power, Amu wrote that on 10 Novewmber 2022, four Taliban forces kidnapped him from Gulai area of Dasht Barchi, when she was going to the market. And they put him in a red Corolla car, closed his eyes and took him to an unknown place. This girl told Amu: “When I was walking home, four or five Taliban people put me in the car. They closed my eyes and mouth and took me to an unknown place. They were four people who raped me in a group and after one day, they released me again. They threatened not to tell anyone about this.” One of this girl’s friends, who is a doctor, told Amu that he has known this girl for several years and before this incident, she was a happy and energetic young person. But after the rape, she has turned into a sick, depressed and scared girl. According to this doctor, until the publication of this report, she was afraid of everything, was in a very bad mental state and thought of suicide many times. This girl told Amu: “I tried to commit suicide twice, I suffer every second. It is not understandable to everyone, except me and the hundreds of girls who are victims of this crime every day.”
In the report, it is stated that another young girl told Amu in a conversation on 18 November 2022, that seven months ago, the Taliban forces forced her into a Ranger in the Dasht Barchi area of Kabul city and took her away. This girl told Amu: “I was coming from an educational center seven months ago, I got out of the car, one of the Taliban came and said your dress is short; While I was wearing hijab. He said get up in the car! I didn’t say anything out of fear and got up. He put something in my mouth, when I regained consciousness, everything was destroyed. After the rape, he put the gun on me, he said, “I will kill your whole family, go away.”
Meanwhile, another resident of Dasht Barchi, Kabul city, told AMO that a year ago, one of the Taliban kidnapped her friend on the way back from an educational center in Dasht Barchi, oil tank area, and forcibly married her. According to this source, this girl was seriously unhappy with living with this Talib and finally, two months ago, she committed suicide.
According to the report, a member of the Taliban named Fazl al-Rahman, assistant to the mayor of the Taliban in Charikar, sexually assaulted a young girl on 29 November 2022. The Taliban officials in Parwan had denied the relationship between the accused person and the mayor of Charikar.
In another case, another girl, Elaha Delavarzi, claims that she was a victim of “forced marriage and rape” by one of the Taliban. On August 30 of this year, she claimed in a video tape that Saeed Khosti, the former spokesperson of the Taliban’s Ministry of Interior Affairs, forced her to marry him in November 2022. He said that Mr. Khosti had “tortured” and “raped” him several times.
After the incident of the rape of Elaha Delavarzi became publicized, she went to Pakistan to escape from the threat of the Taliban and to be transferred to another country from there. However, Haqqani network forces arrested her from Pakistan and transferred her back to Kabul, where according to her family, she is still under the custody of Taliban intelligence and is being tortured and ill-treated.
In a video that was circulated on social media on 24 January, a woman claims that Taliban forces gang-raped her. This young woman says that she decided to commit suicide after this incident; But seeing her one-year-old child, she has given up. It is said that this event happened in Makrorian of Kabul city.
After returning to power, the Taliban have suppressed women in a structured way and against all standards of human and moral rights, and raping them is also a part of this group’s approach towards women. On the other hand, in the past year and a half, due to the leveling of violence against women from the position of public power, the society has also been conducive with many physical and psychological violence against them. During this time, many women have been tortured, sexually abused, sold, or killed by family members and non-family members; While a large number of women and girls, due to escaping from family violence and increasing restrictions of the Taliban, have been forced to take refuge from life and death and commit suicide by different methods, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Interior Affairs of the Taliban, this number in about one year, has reached 369 cases.
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