“We are arrested on charges of ‘moral crime,’” says a woman in a Taliban prison. “I was arrested three months ago,” said another. “They are not doing nothing with our cases. We are just being held here with no explanation.”
The women are featured in a new documentary about the Taliban’s crimes against women in Afghanistan by Ramita Navai, a British-Iranian documentary producer. The one-hour program, Afghanistan Undercover, airs on PBS’s flagship documentary program Frontline.
The documentary shows how the Taliban are arresting women for “moral crimes” or travelling while not accompanied by male chaperones. In addition, they are pressuring women to marry members of the Taliban.
Navai travelled twice to Afghanistan to make this investigative program: first in November-December 2021 and again in March 2022. While in Afghanistan, they got rare access to a women’s prison, using a hidden camera to talk to female prisoners, some of whom are huddled in a courtyard with babies in their arms. Women explained that they are in limbo as the Taliban are holding them without registering their cases or taking them to court. “I have a seven-month-old child at home, my eight children are left behind in a rental home, hungry and thirsty for 21 days,” said one woman.
Maryam’s story is typical. She was arrested for “moral crime,” in her case, being out with the father of a friend rather than a close male relative while trying to locate several friends who had themselves been arrested for being in a taxi. Maryam says she was tortured after her arrest by the Taliban: “Three people were interrogating me and giving me electric shocks to tell them the truth.” After one Talib saw photos of classmates on her phone, she says that he started swearing at her, “If you are not a whore, why did you take pictures with boys?” Then, she says they tasered her and put a gun to her head.
Other women tell similar stories of being arbitrarily arrested by the Taliban and held without due process on charges ranging from abandoning their husbands to travelling without male relatives. Several girls told Frontline that the Taliban tasered them during interrogation, with one having what appeared to be scars from electric shocks on her hands. That pattern of abuse of prisoners was part of a recent Amnesty International report that found the Taliban was torturing prisoners, including by using tasers.
The Taliban do offer the women one perilous way to end their arbitrary detentions. Maryam and her friends recount that the Taliban say, “If you marry a Taliban soldier, we will release you.” They say that two girls who arrived in the prison after their own arrival were forced to marry Talibs to gain their freedom.
The PBS documentary reveals that forced marriages are occurring outside prisons as well. A wealthy businessman who met secretly with the investigative team told them that “a few weeks earlier his nineteen-year old-cousin was forced to marry a powerful Taliban commander, 40 years older than her.”
“They go to the bazaar looking for pretty girls and follow them to find out whose daughter they are,” a witness explains. “They ask for marriage and when the family says no, they threaten them with death and give them no choice.” One man who witnessed Taliban men taking a girl said that he was beaten and whipped. He showed the investigative crew his battered body on the condition that his identity be hidden.
When Ramita Navai asks the spokesman of the ministry of vice and virtue about cases of women being arrested for the crime of “immorality,” he responds, “Perhaps you spoke with those who were raised in the last 20 years of occupation [who have been] influenced by Western ideas.”
As for the women in the prison, they have no idea when their cases will proceed or if they will be released. In a letter to her family, Maryam wrote, “Days and nights pass very difficultly here.”
