Women arrested by Taliban for begging report rape and forced labour
Over the past few months, multiple women say they have been targeted by Taliban officials and detained under anti-begging laws passed this year. While in prison, they claim they were subjected to sexual abuse, torture and forced labour and witnessed children being beaten and abused.
All the women say they were forced to beg on the streets to feed their children after being unable to find paid employment. Since the Taliban retook power, women have been barred from most forms of paid work.
Zahra*, a 32-year-old mother of three, says she was forced to move to Kabul and beg on the streets for food when her husband, who was in the national army, disappeared after the Taliban took power in August 2021.
“I went to the neighbourhood councillor and told him I was a widow, asking for help to feed my three kids,” she says. “He said there was no help and told me to sit by the bakery, maybe someone would give me something.”
Zahra says she was unaware of the Taliban’s anti-begging laws until she was arrested.
“A Taliban car stopped near the bakery. They took my son by force and told me to get in the vehicle,” she says. Zahra claims that she spent three days and nights in a Taliban prison and that initially she was made to cook, clean and do laundry for the men working there.
She was then told she had to be biometrically tested and fingerprinted and when she resisted she was beaten until she was unconscious. She says that she was then raped.
“[Since I’ve been released] I’ve thought about ending my life several times, but my children hold me back,” she says. “I wondered who would feed them if I weren’t here. Who can I complain to? No one will care, and I’m afraid they’d arrest me again if I spoke up. For my life and my children’s safety, I can’t say anything.”
Zahra is one of thousands of women detained by the Taliban on charges of begging. In May, the Taliban passed a new law prohibiting “healthy people” from begging on the streets if they had enough money on them to pay for one day’s food. A commission was established to gather beggars in Kabul and across other provinces to register and categorise them as “professional”, “destitute” or “organised”, which involves taking their biometric data and fingerprints. According to Taliban officials, more than 50,000 beggars have already been “rounded up” in Kabul alone.
Parwana*, a 35-year-old mother of four, shares a similar story to that of Zahra. She was detained in Kabul in October with her four-year-old daughter where she was begging after her husband abandoned them. She says she was taken to Badam Bagh prison and held for 15 days. “They brought in everyone, even young children who polished shoes on the streets. They’d tell us women why we don’t get married, beat us, and make us clean and wash dishes,” she explains to Zan Times.
Parwana says that although she was taken to Badam Bagh under the guise of biometric registration, the process was never carried out. Instead, after she pleaded for her release, one Talib raped her and two other women: “First, he came and did that wrong thing to me, then with a young girl and another woman.”
More than a week has passed since Parwana’s release, but she says that she is too shameful and fearful to return to begging on busy streets. Now, she begs in her own neighbourhood.
Along with multiple reports of rape and torture of women arrested under anti-begging laws, former detainees also say they witnessed the abuse of young children in prison, with one woman alleging that two children were beaten to death while she was in detention.
“No one dared speak,” she says. “If we spoke up, they’d beat us and call us shameless. Watching those children die before my eyes is something I’ll never forget.”
The death of detainees rounded up under anti-begging laws is factored into the wording of the Taliban’s new law, in which Article 25 states: “If a beggar dies while in custody and has no relatives or if the family refuses to collect the body, the municipal officials will handle the burial.”
Samia*, a 30-year-old displaced woman from Badghis, recounts seeing severe child abuse while in Taliban detention: “There were so many children there. They’d bring some dry bread for some of them. One child fainted from hunger. Many children who were shoeshiners or sold seeds and eggs had been arrested along with the women from the streets.”
As a mother of four, Samia says she and her children spent every day from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. begging to make enough for their meals. But a month ago, three women covered in black pulled her by her hair into a Taliban Ranger. After being taken to a police station, she and her child were transferred to the women’s prison of Badam Bagh, where Samia says more than 500 women and children were imprisoned together: “Everyone was crying and wailing. One woman said she’d been there for 20 days. Another had been there 10 days. Some were first-time detainees, others said it was their third time. Some were crying because their kids were left alone at home, others because their kids were in detention. It was chaos.”
This was Samia’s second time at Badam Bagh. A few months earlier, a man had told her that she needed to go there for biometric registration to qualify for assistance. Using her last 150 afghani, she took a taxi to the prison, where her fingerprint, ID number, and phone number were recorded in a computer. “They told me they’d call and survey my home, but no one ever contacted me, visited, or provided any help,” she says.
These women told Zan Times that the Taliban’s promise of financial aid has proven to be as empty as their other promises. Parwana believes that the biometric registration is merely an excuse to harass and assault women and force them to do free labour.
Samia says she gets by with a piece of bread and an onion each day and is deeply fearful of being rearrested if she returns to the streets: “These days, I go door to door in my neighborhood, collecting stale, dry bread. I have no other choice. The Taliban are brutal and oppressive — where can I go to complain about them?”
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Yalda Amini is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist in Afghanistan. ُThis is story published in partnership with the Guardian.
