A disturbing series of videos has gone viral on Afghan social media and has been shared with Zan Times. They feature a young woman who claimed to have been raped, tortured, and forced to marry a Taliban official.
The young woman in a pink scarf introduces herself as Elaha, a third-year medical student at Kabul University, who is now pregnant. In one of the videos, she says that Saeed Khosty, a former spokesman for the Taliban’s Interior Ministry, raped her at the Taliban directorate of intelligence in Kabul earlier this year. She also claims that he filmed the attack and then forced her into marriage.
She talked to Zan Times briefly, when she confirmed her ordeal and pleaded for help amplifying her voice, but the call was disconnected after two minutes. Attempts to reach her again were unsuccessful.
Elaha, the daughter of a former Afghanistan’s national intelligence and security service official, says her ordeal began on a winter day when the Taliban stopped the car she was riding in at a checkpoint. They went through her cell phone and found pictures of the former security forces. They arrested her and transferred her to Police District 11 of Kabul city.
Elaha says that Saeed Khosty, then a spokesman of the Taliban’s Ministry of Interior, met her while she was in custody. In the video, Elaha pleads for help with teary eyes and says that after insulting and humiliating her as well as spitting on her face, Khosty took her to the “Directorate 08, Department 104” of the Taliban intelligence. “I was raped there. I didn’t know what to do, Saeed Khosty took a video of me and threatened to share the video.”
Elaha says that the next day,Taliban officials forced her to record 12 confession videos in which she was told to say that “I got married to Khosty by my own will.”
After that, Elaha says that the Taliban asked her not to tell anyone about her ordeal and sent her home. But Elaha shared it with her family. Even though she was forcefully married to Khosty in custody by a mullah who read the Nikkah verse, the next day, Khosty and his armed men come to Elaha’s house to ask her hand in marriage, threaten her family, and even try to force her sister to marry an elderly Taliban official.
She says that after being married, she was imprisoned in an apartment in Gulbahar Center, a shopping mall in downtown Kabul, where she says Taliban intelligence has a branch. Her movements were closely monitored. “I am confined inside Gulbahar Center. He took my passport, took my ID card. Left no cash on me,” she recounts. In one video, she shows bruises on her hands as signs of the torture she endured while in Khosty’s confinement.
Elaha said that Khosty raped and beat her every night and that is why she tried to escape several times, the last being on August 19, when the Taliban arrested her from the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. (In a video, she shared evidence that she was at the border crossing on that day, as well as pictures of her bloody clothes and face.) “They brought me to Kabul. I was beaten. A Talib told Khosty that this girl has lived under the republic for 20 years, she is an infidel,” she said in a video. “He said that this girl should be stoned to death.” She says they forced her to recite the marriage verse again.
Crying profusely in her online message, Elaha says that she was ordered by a Talib to apologize to her husband for running away. “He told me to kiss Saeed Khosty’s feet. In prison I went down and kissed that man’s feet,” she said.
After returning to Kabul, Elaha says that Khosty’s mother as well as his first wife beat her. “They told me that you are a disbeliever. Why did you run away and ruin our reputation?” she recounts.
Khosty confirmed in a tweet that he married Elaha six months ago, but denied beating and torturing her. “I married a girl named Elaha at her request, after that I saw that she has a problem of faith. I tried to correct her beliefs through advice and discussion, but it didn’t work, until she clearly insulted the Holy Quran, which is also proven,” he tweeted in Pashto. He also apologized for marrying her: “I deeply regret my unapproved marriage. I apologize to the Mujahedeen of the Islamic Emirate and the Afghan people. May God forgive me.”
Even before this series of videos, there have been reports that the Taliban are arresting solo women and forcing them to marry the Taliban members. A new documentary, Afghanistan Undercover, aired on PBS’s flagship documentary program Frontline, documented how the Taliban are arresting women for “moral crimes” or travelling while not accompanied by male chaperones. Once in the prison, the Taliban are pressuring women to marry their members in exchange for their release from custody.
In their first decee on women’s issue in December 2021, the Taliban’s supreme leader banned forced marriage practice, stating that women should not be considered “property” and must consent to marriage. “Adult women’s consent is necessary during Nekah/marriage,” its first point reads. “A woman is not a property, but a noble and free human being; no one can give her to anyone in exchange for a peace deal and or to end animosity,” the decree’s second point states.
However, in the past year, despite the suppression of information and severe media censorship, many accounts of the Taliban officials forcing women into marriage have been documented.
As well, the Taliban have severely curtailed women’s rights to work, education, and movement. They have dismantled virtually all institutional support for women and victims of domestic violence.
In January, a group of UN human rights experts warned that the “Taliban leaders in Afghanistan are institutionalizing large scale and systematic gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls.”
Elaha is one of many women dealing with the harsh realities of life under the Taliban. “My condition is very bad. My life, everything is ruined,” she says in one video. “I spent four years preparing for the entrance exam to get into medical school. I studied for three years, but he didn’t let me continue. He said that those [women] who study are shameless. Those women you see outside are shameless women. The Taliban will close the university soon, after our government’s recognition, then you won’t see a woman on the street.”
“Please help me! Rescue me from this situation,” she repeats throughout the videos. Elaha says she knows that the price of exposing the Taliban’s brutality may be her death. “It is better to die once than a thousand times.”
Zahra Mousawi and Freshta Ghani contributed reporting.
