In the past year, 51-year-old Mina has been changing her residence every three months, fearing for her life and that of her children. She is one of the few women who has worked in Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) for more than three decades. She joined the force in the late 1980s, but when the Taliban took over the country in 1996, she fled to Pakistan.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she returned to Afghanistan and resumed her work at the NDS office in Kabul. But the Taliban’s recent return to power not only took her job away for a second time, it again put the lives of her and her family in danger.
“Two of my sons and I worked in the security sector,” Mina told Zan Times in a phone interview. “We always dealt with people who were involved with terrorist groups. I have handled the cases of female criminals who collaborated with the Taliban and ISIS. They have seen our faces during the interrogation and now that has become a great threat to us.”
Mina says she lives in constant fear and changes her residence regularly to avoid being tracked down.
Monisa, who worked with the NDS for seven years, says she hasn’t left her house more than three times since the Taliban took over. Especially after she was identified by one of the women she had arrested for co-operating with ISIS.
“I was in a van going toward Baghbala when the driver picked up a new passenger. When the new passenger looked at me, she recognized me,” Monisa said. “She grabbed my hand and forced me out of the car. I begged that she was mistaken. She took me to the police station, but thankfully the police believed me and didn’t take my fingerprint, otherwise I would have been exposed.”
Since that incident, Monisa had rarely left her hiding place. “All the details of me and my family are registered in the NDS database and that database is now in the hands of the Taliban. We are very afraid.”
She and her colleagues went underground in the first days of the Taliban regaining power. “The day Kabul was taken by the Taliban, I and 36 other women who worked in the NDS went to a secret location and spent two weeks there without mobile phones or internet. We could not even contact our families. We were very scared and unsure what the Taliban would do to us,” she says.
“When we came out of that hiding place, none of us dared to go to our homes. I don’t trust anyone. The Taliban went to our house several times to search,” Monisa continues.
The Taliban and the criminals they freed from prison are not the only ones who threaten the lives of these women. Shamila, who has worked as a police officer for the past 10 years, says that after the Taliban came to power, her ex-husband, from whom she had separated a few years ago, went to the Taliban and filed a complaint against her. Shamila says that when she and her husband divorced, she took the custody of her three children in exchange for 800,000 afghanis. Now her husband is trying to get custody of children back by going to the Taliban.
Shamila says the reason he’s doing this is to force her 16-year-old daughter into marriage. “My husband’s cousin works with the Taliban, and he has told my husband, ‘Marry off your daughter to me, I will take your children back and put your wife in prison for the crime of collaborating with the previous government,’” she says.
After hearing this, Shamila fled to Pakistan with her children. She does not know what the future holds.
After the Taliban regained power last summer, they announced a general amnesty for those who had worked for the previous government. However, in practice they have actively hunted down, imprisoned and murdered members of the security forces. In January a UN report documented hundreds of cases in which the Taliban gunmen had killed and forcefully disappeared many security personnel of the previous government. Alia Azizi, head of Herat women’s prison, is one such case that has disappeared since the Taliban came to power. Given the overall social and political environment, women members of the security personnel are particularly vulnerable to Taliban abuses, abductions and murder.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees.
