‘I was arrested for the crime of being a Hazara and a woman’: The Taliban’s ‘bad hijab’ campaign targets Hazara women
Note: This story was updated on January 22 to include information from a new UNAMA report.
Mursal* made sure to wear a long black hijab while covering her face with a black mask when she left work after 4 p.m. on Monday, January 8. She knew she had to obey the Taliban decree on hijab if she wanted to appear in public. The edict, which came into effect in May 2022, ordered all women to cover their “faces” in public or risk having their male relative imprisoned.
As Mursal walked home that evening, someone grabbed her hand from behind. “When I looked back, a burly woman covered head to toe in black dragged me toward a vehicle,” she tells Zan Times in voice message. “I shouted, ‘Where are you taking me?’ Then several Taliban soldiers came and started punching and kicking me until they forced me into their vehicle.” She joined another Hazara woman in the car who had been previously arrested by the Taliban.
Mursal weeps as she describes her experience: “They took us to the Police District 13 and there, they beat us with fists, feet, cables and drowned our heads into water. They asked about how we pray and said, ‘You are Hazara, you are not Muslim.’ I will never forget that I was arrested for the crime of being a Hazara and being a woman.”
Mursal is one of three Hazara women in Kabul who talked to Zan Times about their horrific experiences of detention, abuse, and torture in Taliban custody. They say the Taliban have specifically targeted them because of their ethnic and religious identity as Hazara women. They were arrested from Hazara neighbourhoods. Two of these women spent two nights in Taliban custody in a police station and the other one, three nights at the Taliban’s directorate of intelligence in downtown Kabul. All three were subjected to ethnic slurs and torture. In addition, there have been reports of similar arrests in predominantly Tajik-populated neighbourhoods of Kabul.
“The recent arrests of women and girls in several provinces in Afghanistan for alleged ‘bad hijab,’ is another deeply concerning development in which the Taliban are further restricting women’s and girls’ rights and freedoms, including the freedom of expression, and undermining other rights of women and girls,” says Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan. “I am also concerned that these arrests seem to have impacted Hazara women and girls more severely, as [the Taliban] operations have disproportionately taken place in predominantly Hazara-populated areas, with some reports of ethnic slurs being used against them,” Bennett explains to Zan Times. He calls on the Taliban to “immediately stop these operations and for all women and girls arrested for so-called inappropriate clothing to be freed immediately and unconditionally.”
The UN special rapporteur also highlights the consequences of the Taliban’s operation on all women in Afghanistan: “The arrests also escalate a climate of fear among women and girls who believe they might be at risk of arrest by leaving their house.”
In a statement issued on January 11, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) expressed concern about the “arbitrary arrests and detentions of women and girls” over hijab. UNAMA documented the arrest of women in Kabul and Daikundi provinces and “is looking into allegations of ill-treatment and incommunicado detention, and that religious and ethnic minority communities appear to be disproportionately impacted by the enforcement operations.”
On January 22, UNAMA published an update on the human rights condition in Afghanistan, in which it reported on the “bad hijab” arrests in Hazara and Tajik areas: “On 31 December, in certain areas of Kabul city, officials of the de facto Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, in cooperation with de facto police, began to take measures to enforce the 25 April 2022 hijab decree, involving arbitrary arrests and detentions and verbal warnings of a substantial number of women and girls accused of ‘not wearing proper hijab.’ The de facto authorities have arrested women and girls predominantly in West Kabul / Dasht e-Barchi, a Hazara-dominated area, with some also taking place in Khair Khana, which is mainly populated by people of Tajik ethnicity and communities from Panjshir.”
‘We know how to make you disappear’
“All of the women I saw in the Taliban custody were Hazaras,” says Marzia*, a Hazara woman who was arrested on Tuesday, January 2. Marzia was taken to the Taliban’s directorate of intelligence in downtown Kabul, where she was detained for three days. “My clothes were long and I had a mask that covered my face, but, on Tuesday evening at around 5 p.m. as I was shopping for Mother’s Day, the Taliban surrounded me, my friend, and around eight other women who were also there. They forced us into their vehicles,” Marzia tells Zan Times in a phone interview. “I spent three nights in their prison where they would interrogate us, beat us, and humiliate us. They pulled my hair and said, ‘You are a prostitute, you are a nasty Hazara.’”
Marzia didn’t have her phone with her and so couldn’t call her family. It took three days for her mother and uncle to find her. She says her family wasn’t asked to pay money for her release. Still, the Taliban performed biometric scans of her face and fingers and made both her and her uncle sign a written guarantee that she will obey the Taliban dress code. She says a Taliban official whose name she doesn’t know, issued a chilling warning: “Killing you and your family is easy for us. We know how to make you disappear. This was just a warning; otherwise, it is a minute’s work and we know how to do it.”
Another Hazara woman arrested for “bad hijab” is Sakina*, a mother of two, who was picked up just a few hundred metres away from her home in Dasht-e-Barchi as she was shopping to cook dinner. “I had a long dress, but my face was not covered. A woman took my hand and dragged me. When I resisted, several Taliban came and beat me with the butts of their guns, they forced me into a vehicle,” she tells Zan Times in a phone interview.
Inside the vehicle, she joined a group of shocked and upset Hazara women who were shouting for help and crying while the female police beat them in an effort to silence them.
“They took us to Police District 13 and asked to call our mahrams. I didn’t have a phone. It took two nights for my family to find me,” Sakina says, explaining that it was the first time her three-year-old was separated from her. “I was worried they might kill me, but, after getting my biometrics and a guarantee from my family, they released me. But they warned that if they arrest me for a second time, they will lash me, according to sharia.”
Like the other Hazara women detained by the Taliban, Sakina tells Zan Times that all of the women she saw in the Taliban prison were Hazara.
The Taliban, led by Pashtun mullahs, have a long history of bigotry and discrimination against all non-Pashtun ethnicities and religious minorities. In particular, the Taliban have a long history of violence against Hazaras that includes infamous massacres in Bamyan and Mazar-e-Sharif in the 1990s, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan for the first time. With the Taliban back in power, the Hazaras again face systematic discrimination and oppression.
“Under the Taliban rule, Hazara women suffer from an intersectionality of discrimination and violence. The Taliban’s recent targeting of Hazara women through harassment, abduction, and torture is a recent example,” explains Farkhondeh Akbari, a post-doctoral academic at Monash University in Australia. “Women suffer under the Taliban rule in a gender apartheid system. Hazaras also suffer as a marginalized ethnic group.”
In response to the Taliban’s continued clampdown on women’s rights and their systematic discrimination against Hazaras, demonstrations occurred in 30 cities around the world on Sunday, January 31. The demonstrators chanted against the Taliban’s policy of gender apartheid and genocide of the Hazara people.
Doublespeak, Taliban style
The Taliban have given a series of contradictory explanations for the arrests on charges of “bad hijab.” On January 4, the Taliban spokesperson for the ministry of vice and virtue confirmed the arrests to the Associated Press, saying that the women who were arrested “violated Islamic values and rituals, and encouraged society and other respected sisters to go for bad hijab.” The spokesperson also warned, “In every province, those who go without hijab will be arrested.”
Then, two days later, on January 6, in a report on the arrests by the Kabul-based Tolonews channel, the Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid defended the arrests stating, “No organisation, no country and no individual has the right to say why they are arrested or not.”
Two days after that, Zabihullah Mujahid, in the Taliban version of Orwellian doublespeak, confirms the arrests to CBS News by saying “a group of women who were involved in modelling to promote clothes were detained, advised in front of their family members, and released within hours. No woman was subject to imprisonment during this process.”
If that wasn’t enough, he flipped his script on Thursday, January 18, when, in an audiofile aired on Tolonews, he completely denied the arrests had occurred: “The arrests of women is not true, we have rejected it previously and we rejected it again. Any circle or any organisation or any person that makes such a claim, it is not true.”
As word spread throughout Afghanistan of the Taliban’s arrest of women for what they deemed to be “bad hijab,” local Taliban officials attempted to justify their actions. “With the help of policewomen, we have arrested girls who did not have hijab” Ehsanullah Saqib, Taliban official from the vice and virtue ministry told a group of Hazara elders who had gathered in a mosque the Dasht-e-Barchi area of Kabul city, where many of the arrests had occurred. Saqib also explained that hijab means “only one eye could be naked so that they could see their path.” According to him, the arrests were made to “inform their family and guardians” to stop their female members from not observing the Taliban dress code.
A Shia mullah who spoke at the gathering expressed his concern over the arrests. He advised the Taliban to be mindful of the “sensitivity of the situation,” also saying, “Our vice and virtue friends should provide verbal advice on the topic and gather the families, but taking a girl to a police station is by no means prudent.”
Forced to buy their release from prison
There are several reports that the Taliban have extorted money from the families of some of the arrestees. For poor Hazara families, such arrests can be financially devastating. Mursal says that her family had to pay equivalent of 2200 USD to the Taliban for her release, money that her father had to borrow from his relatives. Her family also handed over the land titles to family property.
Rukhshana Media, which reported that the Taliban have arrested women for “bad hijab” in several provinces, including Balkh, also reported that some women remain in prison because their families can’t financially afford to secure their release. UNAMA also stated that it is looking into the “allegations that payments have been demanded in exchange for release.”
The psychological toll of the arrests
In the conservative society of Afghanistan, the arrest of women can bestow “shame” and “dishonour” on their families; this further isolates women and puts them at a greater risk of social stigma and mental illness.
Mursal’s experience of being imprisoned and tortured left her traumatized and isolated. On top of that, her family turned against her: “Even at home, my family threatened and blamed me for my arrest. They say, ‘We told you, the situation is not good for women, don’t go out, you didn’t listen,’” she tells Zan Times. Mursal says her family is worried about the shame her arrest could bring on the family. “None of our relatives know about my arrest and my family has not allowed me to leave the house since my release,” she explains.
“For any human, the experience of being wrongfully arrested, detained, and physically and sexually abused would be a highly traumatizing experience. This kind of abuse leaves physical, psychological and interpersonal consequences – people suffer pain and bodily symptoms after such abuse, emotional distress, anxiety, fear, and mistrust of other people” explains Dr. Katherine Porterfield, a New York based clinical psychologist at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture into Zan Times. In a phone interview with Zan Times, she emphasizes that “all of these symptoms require care and support in order to heal.”
What will happen if that care and support is not there? “For Afghan women who are returning to their communities after such abuse and then being told they must hide, stay silent, and not report what happened to them, the consequences are worsened. This secrecy and shame creates another layer of trauma for these women, as they are forced to be silent about their victimization and not bring the perpetrators to justice” says Porterfield.
“Now, days and nights, I can’t sleep. I feel that I am back in Taliban prison, where they drowned my head into the water and tortured me,” Mursal says. “I am totally tired of this life, of being a girl. I wish I had died.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees.
Ferdaws Andishmand has contributed to this report.
