When the Taliban’s men came knocking at her house in January, Nooran* went and hid in her parent’s yard. “I did not want to be arrested along with my mother,” says the Afghan teen. Moments later, her mother Shahbaneh* was taken away.
On 8 January, Taliban officials detained Shahbaneh over a social media post ruing the fate of her family’s young women, who would no longer be able to attend school. Nooran shows The Independent the Facebook post her mother had made, commenting on the local school’s notice that it was shutting down due to a lack of teachers and resources.
She wrote in her post: “Forgive me, my daughter, for what we have done to you. We cannot escape this savage group.” Within a few hours, she received a message telling her: “Remove your message because you have insulted the Taliban. This is the order of the Commander of the Faithful.”
The next day, two Taliban men arrived in Ford Ranger pick-up trucks in their busy neighbourhood in Herat and summoned Shahbaneh. “They then took my mother away,” Nooran says, sitting alongside her in a video call from Afghanistan late in the evening. They fall quiet as a motorbike passes by outside, afraid they might be overheard.
Friday marks four years since the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan, seizing Kabul from a democratically-elected government after the shambolic withdrawal of Nato forces.
Since 2021 the Taliban have announced around 100 edicts restricting the movement of girls and women through society, arresting women for having ill-fitting head scarves, speaking on social media and being out in public. Despite claiming it would not return to its hardline rule of the 1990s, not a single one of these edicts has been overturned, according to the UN assistance mission for Afghanistan (Unama).
More than 78 per cent of Afghan women are no longer in education, employment or training, the UN said this month in its report. The edicts are also a matter of life and death in areas of the health sector, with a shortage of female healthcare workers allowed to treat women patients. “The results are devastating. Women are living shorter, less healthy lives,” the Unama said.
The Taliban does not hesitate in enforcing its rules by arresting and detaining women who break them – placing them in prisons where abuse is commonplace. The Independent heard repeated claims that women are raped by guards in these facilities, allegations which are difficult to verify.
“At night, I saw the Taliban prisons where the basic living conditions are horrible, guards coming in and taking the women away at night. Next day, the women would tell us they were raped,” Shahbaneh says. “They tied my hands to my head, and beat me up till I cried, telling me that they will kill me if I continue to speak about education of girls and women,” she says.
Shahbaneh narrated the basic conditions of prison treatment under the Taliban, consistent with multiple other accounts of arrested men and women. “There will be no food, no water, you are locked away in a dark room for days and nights. There isn’t even a window for feeling any air on your face – that is the punishment you get for crossing the Taliban,” the 37-year-old former teacher says.
“As a punishment, many women who shared the cell with me were asked to clean the prison floor,” she said.
She was released after a month on 8 February this year, still with her only “crime” being a social media post criticising the most basic violation of human rights.
Recounting her pain – and expressing disbelief that the world is turning a blind eye – she says: “We are in danger for even breathing and existing as women. It is like the world cannot hear our voices, like they hate Afghan women.”
The restrictions on all aspects of women’s lives seem only to be tightening, with the number of punishments over hijab regulations growing. In certain parts of Afghanistan including Herat province, women have been ordered to wear a chador, a full body covering, and are banned from going out in public if they fail to do so.
Unama says the Taliban have asked health clinics and private businesses to strictly refuse services to women who are not accompanied by a male chaperone, a mehram.
Asma, a 27-year-old who has been offering discreet legal advice to women in Kabul, says that the options available to women in her field of divorce and domestic violence cases have become bleak.
“Me and my colleagues who are working with women seeking divorce over domestic violence from their husbands face two hellish choices – go back to their abusive husband or face prison time. Surprisingly, the women are choosing to go to prison,” the young legal adviser told The Independent.
“In the prison, many are facing rape and physical assault.”
The Independent has reached out to the Taliban’s ministry of interior for a comment on these allegations about its prison system, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Sadly, the allegations are hardly new – dire accounts of ill treatment from women who have left Taliban detention have been a constant feature of the past four years.
Julia Parsi, a former Afghan teacher turned prominent human rights defender who burned a photo of the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Hibatullah in 2022, lost hearing in one of her ears after being slapped by several Taliban officials in prison.
“I was subjected to severe psychological and physical pressure. The psychological torture was far worse than the physical abuse. They threatened me with harm to my family, especially my young daughters. The interrogations were filled with threats, insults, and humiliation,” the exiled Afghan activist told The Independent. She had to be hospitalised after her release from e prison in December 2022.
Parsi, now out of Afghanistan after facing death threats but continuing to work for Afghan women rights, says women are being rounded up and put behind the bars for “opposing the Taliban’s policies”.
“In recent arrests, the Taliban have primarily targeted women who have raised their voices on social media or participated in civic and political activities. Even women who have spoken only in small gatherings or taught lessons in their homes have been arrested under the accusation of ‘opposing Taliban policies’,” Parsi said, adding “improper hijab” has been the biggest reason in recent weeks for the arrest of Afghan girls and women.
“‘Improper hijab’ is merely an excuse — the real purpose is to suppress and silence women,” she says.
Such “policies” are having a profound effect on a generation of women – 62 per cent of Afghan women now feel they cannot even influence decisions at home, let alone have their voices or faces be seen outside, according to a UN survey.
Zubaida Akbar, an Afghan human rights expert and programme manager at Femena, an organisation that supports human rights defenders, said that the Taliban have tortured women with physical abuse including rape and sexual assault, alongside mental abuse and ethnic slurs.
“In terms of the ways that the Taliban have degraded women, women activists detailed to us physical abuse, assault, beatings inside the prison, sexual abuse, lack of access to food, sanitation, not being able to sleep, interrogations, especially late at night,” Akbar told The Independent.
“In the cases where women are abducted from their homes, I don’t say arrested because the Taliban are not the government, they don’t have a legal system – none of [what] has happened, happens legally. Women are abducted from their homes or from the streets,” Akbar said, calling on the international community to do more to protect Afghan women.
“The world must pay attention, first and foremost. They need to pressure the Taliban to end their war on the women of Afghanistan and reverse all of the 130 edicts that the Taliban have issued against women.”
Even when they leave prison, women told The Independent that the experience robbed them of their sense of security in their communities, and they feared stepping out of their homes.
“When my mother goes out of the house, her heart is always beating, worried that someone will attack her. With every step, she is always looking behind her while walking. A few days back, my mother’s friend asked her, ‘Why are you looking behind you so much?’. My mother just stood there in silence, afraid of confessing her fears,” Nooran said.
But her ordeal has not broken Shahbaneh’s spirit. She says she plans to demonstrate again on Friday against the Taliban.
“I am going to protest again on 15 August to mark my refusal to accept them as our leaders,” she says. “This does not end, my fight will continue to free my daughter from the Taliban’s grip.”
