Hiding in her basement, a radio presenter in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz was paralyzed with fear when the Taliban came looking for her as they conducted house-to-house searches for working women after storming the city.
Long condemned as misogynistic zealots, the Taliban have sought to project a softened stance on female rights, but the insurgents’ three-day occupation of Kunduz offers an ominous blueprint of what could happen should they ever return to power.
Harrowing testimonies have emerged of death squads methodically targeting a host of female rights workers and journalists just hours after the city fell on Sept. 28.
Photo: AFP
When they knocked on the radio host’s door, her uncle answered, she said, requesting anonymity due to safety concerns.
“We know a woman in your house works in an office,” she said they told him.
“When my uncle denied it, he was taken outside and shot dead. His body lay in the streets for days — no one dared to go out and get it.”
Such testimonies hark back to the Taliban’s 1996 to 2001 rule of Afghanistan, when women were relegated to the shadows.
Rights groups say female prisoners in Kunduz were raped and midwives were targeted for providing reproductive health services to women.
Rampaging insurgents destroyed three radio stations run by women, looted a girls’ school and ransacked offices working for female empowerment, stealing their computers and smashing their equipment, according to several sources including activists and local residents.
One of their main targets were women’s shelters, which give refuge countrywide to runaway girls, domestic abuse victims and those at the risk of “honor killings” by their relatives.
The Taliban have often denounced the shelters as dens of “immorality” and labelled the women who seek shelter there as “sluts.”
“Where are you hiding those women from the shelter?” Haseena Sarwari recalled being asked in an abrupt telephone call from the head of the Taliban’s vice and virtue department soon after they took the city.
“They are safely in Kabul,” Sarwari, the Kunduz director of Women for Afghan Women, a non-governmental organization which ran a shelter housing 13 women, said she told the insurgent.
“He laughed and said: ‘It is good for them they managed to get away,’” she said.
That women’s shelter has since been destroyed by fire.
The Taliban tried to project a moderate view on women’s rights through informal peace talks earlier this year, where insurgent representatives for the first time sat across the table from Afghan women and even prayed alongside them.
“There has always been a serious disconnect between their vague promises and the behavior of the Taliban on the ground, where they have continued to threaten, attack and kill women who stepped out of roles of total subservience,” said Heather Barr, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
“In Kunduz we might have caught a glimpse of how little their pledges to women are worth,” she said.
Sarwari is no stranger to threats from the Taliban, but the married mother-of-two also received an astonishing letter just before the insurgents stormed Kunduz.
Wrapped in a wedding card, the note warned that she would be married off to a Taliban commander. Sarwari said the threat could not be dismissed lightly.
In some areas overrun by the Taliban, she said insurgents are known to have married off wives of government officers to their cadres, treating the women as spoils of war.
Women who fled Kunduz said the Taliban used a “hit list,” including names, photographs and mobile phone clips of their targets, sparking fears there had been a large-scale identity theft from the computers and documents stolen from various city offices.
Many received calls and text messages with a clear message from the Taliban: “Don’t come back or we will kill you.”
As Sarwari was fleeing the city in a burqa, she recalls seeing a band of thickset insurgents wrapped in bandoliers of ammunition at Taliban checkpoints, rifling through women’s purses for any government IDs and scrolling through mobile phones for contacts.
They also chastised some women for travelling without a male chaperone.
“The Taliban still adhere to the idea that women must submit to men, that they are half-brained, and offer mere ornamental value,” Sarwari said during an interview in Kabul. “The tumult in Kunduz showed us that their medieval mindset has still not changed.”
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was