Sharifa is the pseudonym of a young teacher who says her life has turned into hell since the Taliban took over. Losing her job and being forced to stay at home were only two small parts of her problems. After Nimruz Province fell to the Taliban, Sharifa’s two brothers, who were members of the security forces of the previous government, fled the country, fearing for their lives. Since returning to power, the Taliban have systematically disappeared and murdering members of the former government’s security forces. But the departure of her brothers meant that Sharifa was left alone with her elderly parents.
Six months ago, a Taliban commander and his men came to her home. “It was night when they came to our house and asked for tea. While the tea was served, the Taliban commander ‘congratulated’ my father for my engagement with one of his men,” Sharifa told Zan Times in a phone interview.
Her father couldn’t stop the forced marriage. “My father begged them, but the Taliban commander put a gun over my father’s head and said ‘Old man, I feel pity for you, otherwise I would have killed you and taken your daughter by force,’” she adds.
“They forcibly dragged me out of the house after reciting the marriage verse. I was screaming and clinging to the doorframe while they dragged away,’ she recounts. That very night, her new husband took her to Bakwa district, where she lived for four months, separated from her parents.
Her husband tortured and abused her every night. “My husband was a very violent and nasty Talib. Every night he beat me,” Sharifa said. She remembers her husband explaining why he was beating her: “I beat to cleanse your sins, because your brothers were soldiers in the previous government. Infidelity is in your blood.”
Eventually, he returned her to her parents’ home, where she now lives, though she doesn’t know if her husband will ever come back.
Sharifa is part of a horrifying trend in which female relations of members of the former government’s security forces are being forcibly married, raped, or beaten. Two weeks ago Elaha Delawarzi, a third-year student at Kabul Medical University and the daughter of a general of the old regime, spoke of her experience of rape, torture, imprisonment, and forced marriage by a senior member of the Taliban.
In videos published on social media, she revealed that the former Taliban Ministry of Interior spokesperson Saeed Khosty raped her at a Taliban’s intelligence office in Kabul.
“It would be no surprise for a Taliban official to feel free to inflict forced marriage, rape, assault, nonconsensual filming, and blackmail. The question is how many such cases go unheard,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement. The organization calls on diplomats in Kabul to “urgently inquire about Elaha’s whereabouts and well-being.”
Citing a journalist who looked into similar cases to that of Elaha, Human Rights Watch said that Taliban have a pattern of similar behaviour with other members of the families of the security forces of the previous government.
A group of women in Kabul gathered in an indoor place in early September, protested the Taliban forced marriages and rapes of women. They shared a video with Zan Times in which they read their statement. “The Taliban are giving a religious color to their oppression and aggression against women and use religion as a tool to achieve their rutish and sinister goals,” a woman reads the statement in the video. The protestors demanded the Taliban should put an immediate end to forced marriages. The protestors also criticised the international community’s lack of actions against the Taliban abuses in the documented cases of forced marriages.
In a statement posted on Facebook on September 2, the UN office in Afghanistan requested from the Taliban authorities to investigate cases of forced marriage and women rights abuses and punish the perpetrators. “We call on the de facto authorities to transparently investigate all alleged violations of women’s rights, to hold perpetrators to account and to ensure safety of Afghan women and girls,” UN said.
