This report has been published in partnership with the Guardian.
In a voice message recorded weeks before she died, Liza Shams, 33, asks a relative to pray for her. “There’s no end to my days of misfortune,” she says. “Pray that God shames Hasib [her husband Hasibullah Sarwari] in front of the whole world for what he has done to me.” In a second recording, she describes being beaten by Sarwari while pregnant, then kept isolated for days, injured to the point she couldn’t eat or speak. “I’m a woman, fine, I should not talk about what happens in my home,” she says. “But I can’t do this anymore.”
On the afternoon of 1 February, Liza’s neighbours heard screaming and alerted police. A short while earlier, Liza’s father, Shamsuddin Shams, had received a video call from his daughter. Her injuries were shocking: “Her jaw was broken and she could hardly talk,” he says, but she had managed to pass the message that her husband had beaten her again. Shamsuddin immediately called his two other daughters who lived close by, who arrived at the house and took her to Rahmat Hospital in Kabul. Roughly seventy minutes after arrival, Liza died.
The forensic report on her death shows that Liza’s face has been beaten in. The CT scan findings describe multiple fractures to her cheekbones and sinus walls, an injury pattern consistent with enormous blunt-force trauma to the face. Photographs of her body and the report’s physical examination, conducted the evening she died, document extensive bruising, injuries and swelling across her face and body.
Despite the extensive nature of her injuries, the forensic report lists the likely cause of death as poisoning by rat-poison phosphide, noting that an autopsy was not performed at the family’s request.
Her husband’s family have since argued Liza’s death was suicide, and that the bruising covering her body is a side effect of poison. Suicide is frequently listed as the cause of death in Afghanistan in cases where women die in extremely violent circumstances – a designation that typically means no-one will be held accountable for the death. Her father believes her death was murder.
A clear pattern
The Taliban do not collect any data on how many Afghan women are killed each year. The Attorney General’s Office, which used to collect this data, was abolished by decree in 2023.
To measure what the state will not, our reporters collected cases of women killed across 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces since the Taliban came to power in August 2021, drawing on 174 cases reported by local Afghan media, as well as 57 cases documented directly by the journalists, that had not previously been reported on. The investigation found women across Afghanistan are being killed at home by husbands, fathers, brothers, in a system that all but guarantees impunity for the crime. Many cases are never entered into official records.
The result: 231 cases across those 10 provinces, of which 53 were declared suicide. The provinces with the highest recorded tolls were Jawzjan (36), Herat (32), Badakhshan (28) and Ghazni (26). The age of victims ranged from girls as young as five to women of 65. Seven out of 10 victims — 165 of 231 — were housewives with no independent income or institutional standing to pursue a domestic violence case. The vast majority of cases occurred inside the victim’s own home. Across the entire dataset, only 58 arrests were recorded. More than one in five were officially declared suicide, even when there was significant evidence of foul play. Only one in four of the total killings resulted in any arrest, but even in these cases, the suspect was often released – sometimes just one day after their arrest.
The reporters found a number of deaths that according to family or witnesses had resulted from domestic violence, but were being officially recorded as suicides.
A hospital worker in Jawzjan said that many of the dead women that came to hospital and were labelled suicides had clearly been beaten, their bodies covered in wounds and bruises.
Fereshta Emadi, 33, a UN agency employee in Kabul, was found dead in her home on 31 May, 2026. Her husband reportedly told Taliban police she had killed herself, citing a psychiatric condition.
Her family and friends, however, believe she was killed by her husband. Five people who knew her said Fereshta, who had been married off at 17, had spent fifteen years being beaten, choked, and controlled. A colleague who worked with her said Fereshta had described her husband repeatedly strangling her and telling her, “I’ll cut your throat.”
Danger for families who intervene
Often, the families of girls who try to intervene on behalf of their daughters can face deadly consequences. In Kandahar, a 14 year-old girl was killed after being given into marriage to a much older man. Her husband was violent, and she fled back to her father’s family. When he came to force her home in October 2024, she refused to go. He drew a pistol and killed her. Her younger brother, who ran to help, was shot too and died of his wounds a week later.
The Taliban opened a file, but her husband, a serving member of the group, was never arrested.
In Sar-e Pul, Sara, 16, and her mother Chaman, an Iranian-trained doctor, were shot dead in May this year by a local Taliban official who had forced an engagement on Sara. When Chaman refused to hand her daughter over without the agreed dowry, he beat her with his rifle and, as Sara ran to her mother, shot them both. He was captured after a manhunt and remains jailed.
Liza’s father says speaking up has come with a cost. His two daughters who took Liza to hospital were subsequently summoned by the Taliban and have now gone into hiding. “It is because we spoke to the media, the Taliban don’t want issues like this to become public.”
The Taliban’s new criminal code means a husband’s punishment for beating his wife to the point of visible injury such as fracture or wounds is capped at 15 days’ imprisonment. If a wife goes to her family’s house without her husband’s permission, however, and her family does not return her on request, both the wife and her family are subject to three months in prison. The code creates a legal structure in which seeking refuge from domestic violence invokes a worse punishment than the violence itself.
Even before the Taliban, Afghan women were experiencing gender based violence nearly three times higher than the global average. UN Women’s 2024 Afghanistan Gender Index, found that in 2018, nearly 35% of Afghan women reported violence from a partner in the past year — compared to a global average of 13%.
As the number of killings mounts, already-paltry protections for women facing violence have been stripped away. After August 2021, the Taliban dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the special prosecutor’s office for violence against women, and the country’s shelter network. Around 250 female judges were removed from the bench; female prosecutors were sent home.
Afghan law no longer permits a woman to be a direct party to her own legal case, so mothers cannot pursue justice for their daughters. In Takhar province, Shamsia*, the mother of a 23 year-old woman who was stabbed and set on fire by her husband in May 2025, told us she was ordered by the local court to transfer power of attorney to her husband to pursue the case “because a woman cannot be a direct party to a petition or case file.” Five months on, the case has gone nowhere.
What the numbers can’t show
Our reporters could not interview most families of the women killed. Fear closed many doors; in several provinces, the journalists received threats after even attempting to make contact. The 231 cases in this dataset are not Afghanistan’s femicide total – they provide only a snapshot of the potential killings, the dynamics that enable them, and the impunity that many killers enjoy.
Liza Shams’s case will likely be decided by a Taliban court. Her father, who has little hope of anyone being held responsible, has turned to social media, publishing recordings, hospital footage, and documents in a public campaign for justice for his daughter.
Among the recordings her father published is a voice message Liza sent to her brother-in-law, in which she speaks about her marriage and her life.
“I feel like I’m suffocating,” she says. “I suffer from these things. I’ll try every day, I’ll try every day, but this isn’t working. Our life can’t go on like this. I don’t want our life to be bitter. My children are growing up, they’ll look at us and see that we are fighting. But it can’t go on like this.”
Zahra Nader is Editor in chief of Zan Times
Khadija Haidary is the Managing editor of Zan Times
*Hura Omar and Atousa Azar are the pen names of two Zen Times journalists who are based in Afghanistan.
Tarana Mohammadi*, Sophia Malek*, Simen Danishjo*, Atia FarAzar*, Faranak Aryaye*, Tomris Tamga*, Maria Rahim*, Goharshad*, Raha Malik* and Nahid Naji* contributed to this report.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
