How the brutal Taliban justice system that buries Afghan women alive works

Since their full return to power in August three years ago, the Taliban have imposed a system that includes “moral” crimes, often punished by flogging or stoning. Laws used to oppress women while courts and tribunals increasingly ignore gender-based crimes and violence. A suffocating scenario that follows them even into hospitals and public parks,

A village of dust and wind, like many others in Afghanistan. The space of beaten earth covered with stones is surrounded by men, bearded, turbaned, rifles dangling from their shoulders. They talk to each other, they seem uncertain, they arm themselves. They pick up stones from the ground, like clumsy children for a game. In the center is a hole, deep enough to cover the lower part of a body. Of a woman’s body.

Her face is erased in the video but her faint moans can be heard. She doesn’t scream, she no longer has the strength. She has given up. The men begin shooting at the target, they look at each other, they approve. The moans increase, dragging, like a litany. The target is easy, exposed. One after the other, the stones extinguish the life of the young woman. A good stoning has its rules: not too small stones, otherwise they do not hurt enough, nor too big otherwise the agony is over immediately. The hole in which the condemned woman is buried prevents her from escaping but also preserves her “morality”, prevents her private parts from being visible.

Since last March, the supreme Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has announced that corporal punishment, including public flogging and stoning, are instruments of law and will be mandatorily applied throughout Afghanistan. Then he turned to the West: “In your vision, stoning is a violation of women’s rights. In the near future, we plan to apply the punishment for adultery, which includes stoning and public flogging of women. Just as you claim to fight to save and liberate humanity, so do I. You represent Satan and I represent God. The party of Allah will prevail.”

The party of Allah, namely the Taliban, certainly prevails in Afghanistan, where they do what they want, with timid and useless protests from democratic countries only at home, more interested in business with the de facto authorities of the country, than in women’s rights.

The UN representative for Human Rights, Jeremy Laurence, denounced in June the increase in the spread of physical punishment, administered in public for “moral crimes” and “running away from home”. Spectators are strictly controlled, no journalists, no witnesses, cell phones confiscated.

Zina, or adultery, is the crime. An axe hanging over the head of every woman for many years, not only since the Taliban have controlled the country. It is not at all necessary to actually cheat on one’s husband, which is quite difficult now for women locked up in their homes and under surveillance. A woman who runs away from the house of an abusive husband to save her skin is accused of zina, as is a girl who refuses to marry an old stranger, a woman who talks to men who are not family, a girl who wants to marry the man she loves. The crime is always zina. It condemns, with a slanderous mark, any rebellion of women, who can become victims of the increasingly frequent “honor killings” by families. The threat of moral crimes cages the daily behavior of women. And, since almost everything is forbidden to women, it is easy to commit crimes. “Going out has become very difficult,” says Salima, a social worker in Kabul. “The moral police are everywhere, they check everything, from the way you dress to the reasons why you are on the street. They try to scare us. If you are not in order, you will be arrested and we know what to expect, sexual violence and beatings. Months ago, we were going with my family to Pagman, a recreational destination, a beautiful park. At the entrance, the Taliban guards stopped us, as soon as they saw that there were women in the car. They started shouting that women are forbidden to enter public parks and to have fun. They threatened to arrest us, to whip us, because we were breaking the law. This scene will remain in my mind forever, as an image of the total deprivation of all our rights. The organized will to bury us alive.”

Suicides and mental illnesses are on the rise among women, especially among the youngest. Frightened mothers keep their daughters locked up at home. “Manizha was one of our most enthusiastic students,” says Razia, a teacher at the clandestine schools. “One day she didn’t show up, and the next day she didn’t show up either. She disappeared. We did everything we could, together with her mother, to find her. We don’t know anything about her anymore.” The Taliban feel free to kidnap the girls whenever they want.

No one protests. No one punishes.

But how does Taliban justice work? An example, just to get an idea. A woman is rushed to the hospital by her neighbors. Her husband beat her and set her on fire. The burns are very serious. After a month of agony, the woman dies. Her family appeals to the Taliban court to have the murderer punished. After much insistence, the court orders the man to give the family a small plot of land as compensation. That’s it. A vegetable garden instead of a daughter.

The Taliban have dismantled the legal and institutional framework. Justice, as we understand it, no longer exists. There is a Taliban Supreme Court and there are several specific and local courts. But the previous staff is completely replaced.

Instead of judges, lawyers and prosecutors there are students or graduates of Pakistani madrassas, with no experience in the legal field, or in other fields. No idea what a trial is, no investigation. The result is a void and widespread chaos in which violations of rights and abuses increase uncontrollably. The most common method to close a case remains torture and forced confession, as reported by Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organization based in England, with operators inside Afghanistan, in its report on justice. The laws of Parliament have been almost completely abolished, especially those concerning women.

For them, no protection, no hope of having justice. Crimes against women are no longer a crime. So there is no longer any limit to domestic violence and the escalation of suicides and forced marriages of girls. If a woman has the courage to go to the police to complain about her husband’s violence, she risks suffering further violence, verbal and physical. In the Taliban courts, cases concerning women are not taken into consideration.

In the last year, there have been no proceedings involving accusations brought by women. The most serious criminal cases are judged in religious courts, in jirgas, presided over by mullahs and village elders, and are handled outside of any legal structure.

The life of the population is regulated by continuous decrees issued with the effect of law. There have been more than two hundred of which one hundred concern women. “There is only the sharia,” says Soheila, a militant of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women. “We have no laws and we do not have a Parliament that can discuss laws, or other institutions. Afghanistan is a country that has no Constitution, no legal system, it only has the sharia. You don’t need anything else, according to the Taliban. Every type of problem, in any field, education, family, justice, can be solved according to the laws of the sharia. Anyone who knows, or thinks they know, the Koran and the sharia can be a judge, especially if they are armed and have power. Everything is completely arbitrary.”

During 2023, women’s lives have further deteriorated. There is no limit to the worst. Rawadari’s latest report tells us. The new bans for women have increased in number, worsened by the frequency of arrests and public punishments. Some have been arrested and detained for taking a taxi without a male guard, the mahram. Extrajudicial killings, torture, killings of prisoners, forced disappearances, increase in cruel and degrading punishments, these are the testimonies collected. Intimidation and fear paralyze people, especially women, who, less and less, rebel. The prison is increasingly narrow.

Even the hospital becomes a mirage. Access to medical care is limited by 14 specific measures. In the hospital, you do not go alone. No one lets you in and you are mistreated. It is mandatory to have a mahram by your side. But the men of the family are often not interested in having their women treated. The additional obstacle is the lack of female staff. A male doctor can’t even see you.

In hospitals, the mahram is not only required for female patients. “On October 24, 2023 – according to Rawadar’s report – officials from the public health department in Bamyan prohibited female hospital employees, nurses, pharmacists, doctors, from continuing their service without a mahram to supervise them throughout their working hours. In Nimruz, however, one hundred female health professionals were expelled and replaced by as many male relatives of the Taliban”.

Little is known about those who have been kidnapped, arrested, punished, the media are controlled. Intimidation and threats against witnesses, victims of abuse and journalists are daily. In some provinces, such as Panjshir, cell phones have been banned, so that videos and testimonies cannot be spread.

A prisoner, the Guardian reported on July 3, is the victim of a gang rape by the Taliban, her jailers. Men turn a video about violence and send it to the girl, threatening to make it public if she doesn’t keep her mouth shut about what happened. But the girl defies them and sends the video to the local and international press. We don’t know if she survived her courage.

The little that we can learn comes from social media. Not only from the victims but also from the Taliban themselves, who are very active on the platforms. On Twitter (now X) you can find sentences, convictions and punishments decided by the Taliban courts. They mostly concern women and LGBTQ+ people. They support the propaganda of fear.

None of this was discussed at the recent conference in Doha between the end of June and the beginning of July. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) publishes excellent reports on the situation of women, they talk about gender persecution and crimes against humanity, with consequent recommendations to act. That fall into the void of the luxurious halls of Doha where the blackmail of the Taliban, which tied their participation to silence on women’s rights, was accepted by the UN without batting an eyelid.

So women, girls and children continue to walk, day after day, their labyrinth of prohibitions, with anxiety in their throats, fear nestled firmly in their thoughts. What is left for women? Little, apart from the tenacity and courage of those who persist in not letting themselves be crushed, in not letting their dreams burn to ashes. Girls who continue, for example, despite the high risk, to study in secret schools, protecting the precious knowledge of women like a treasure.

Samia, a student at a clandestine school in Rawa, says: “I have nothing to achieve my goals, except a pen.”

Published in Altreconomia

The image is from a stock photo and refers to a stoning carried out in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2015.