Zahra Joya
A mural in Kabul shows protesting women. The response from the Taliban to protesters has been brutal. Photograph: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
The Guardian has seen video evidence of a female Afghan human rights activist being gang-raped and tortured in a Taliban jail by armed men.
There have been mounting reports that sexual violence is being inflicted on women and girls being held in detention in Afghanistan, but this video is believed to be the first direct evidence of these crimes occurring.
According to the activist, the mobile phone footage was later sent to her as a threat that it would be shared more widely if she continued to speak out against the Taliban regime.
In the video recording viewed by the Guardian and Rukhshana Media, the young woman is filmed being told to take off her clothes and is then raped multiple times by two men.
The woman in the video – recorded on a phone by one of the armed men – tries to cover her face with her hands. One of the men pushes her hard when she hesitates as he gives her orders.
At one point she is told, “You’ve been fucked by Americans all these years and now it’s our turn.”
The woman has said that she was arrested for taking part in a public protest against the Taliban and was raped while being held in detention in a Taliban prison. She has since fled Afghanistan. She said that after she spoke out against the Taliban in exile, she was sent the video and told that if she continued to criticise the regime the video would be sent to her family and released on social media.
“If you continue saying anything bad against the Islamic Emirate, we will publish your video,” she said she was told.
She believes that the attack was deliberately recorded to be used to silence and shame her. The person filming the assault captures her standing naked with her face visible and she is identifiable during the attacks.
Last week the Guardian published accounts of teenage girls and young women who said that they were sexually assaulted and beaten after being detained under Afghanistan’s draconian hijab laws.
In one case, a woman’s body was allegedly found in a canal a few weeks after she had been taken into custody by Taliban militants, with a source close to her family saying she had been sexually abused before her death.
At one point she is told, “You’ve been fucked by Americans all these years and now it’s our turn.”
The UN’s special rapporteur on Afghanistan has recently reported that women were thought to be facing sexual violence in detention.
Since they took power in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed what human rights groups are calling a “gender apartheid” on Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls, excluding them from almost every aspect of public life. Women and girls are blocked from attending secondary school, banned from almost every form of paid employment, prevented them from walking in public parks, attending gyms or beauty salons and told to comply with a strict dress code.
The Taliban have also announced the reintroduction of the public flogging and stoning of women for adultery.
The Guardian and Rukhshana Media spoke with multiple other female protestors and activists who have also come forward to allege that they have been tortured and beaten after being arrested for calling for women’s rights.
Zarifa Yaqubi, 30, said she was imprisoned for 41 days in November 2022, after attempting to organise a movement for Afghan women.
“They gave electric shocks and hit parts of my body with cables so that I would not be able to show in front of the camera tomorrow,” she said, adding that she had been tortured into admitting to taking money from foreigners to protest against the Taliban.
Parwana Nejarabi, 23, said she was beaten and given electric shocks after being detained by Taliban forces when protesting for women’s rights in early 2022. She said she spent a month in solitary confinement and was shown a letter with an order for her to be stoned to death. “I could hear them saying, ‘She should be killed,’” she said. She was released after a forced confession and fled Afghanistan to live in exile.
Despite the huge risks to their safety, women inside Afghanistan are still staging public protests and criticising the Taliban regime, with Rukhshana Media recording at least 221 acts of protest by women and girls over the past two years.
A spokesperson for the Taliban, Zabhullah Mujahid, denied the allegations of the widespread sexual assaults on women in prison.
Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch said the Taliban continue to act with “complete impunity for abuses, particularly behind the prison walls.”
“The Taliban are aware of how much stigma is involved around the issue of sexual violence in Afghanistan and how incredibly difficult – and usually impossible – it is for victims of sexual violence to come forward and tell their stories, even sometimes to their own families, because there is a risk of shame and potentially ‘honour’ violence,” said Barr.
The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said: “I am alarmed by reports of torture and ill-treatment in Afghanistan, including allegations of sexual violence in detention, especially of women. We are continuing to look into these reports and to establish the facts.”
Earlier this week, Taliban officials took part in a special meeting on Afghanistan hosted by the UN in Doha to discuss the country’s future. No Afghan women were present at the meeting and women’s rights were not included on the agenda.
Published in partnership with Rukhshana Media