The UN on Friday sounded the alarm over Taliban crackdowns on peaceful protests, many of them by women demanding equal rights, and journalists covering such events.
In one case, two Afghan video journalists were beaten with iron rods.
Tagi Daryabi said he and a colleague were covering a protest earlier this week by women demanding their rights from Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Taliban fighters stopped the two journalists, bound their hands and dragged them away to a police station in Kabul’s District 3.
The 22-year-old photographer told reporters that the first thing he heard in the station were screams from a nearby room.
Several fighters then began beating him and his colleague, 28-year-old Neamatullah Naqdi, he said.
At one point, he was beaten non-stop for 10 minutes, Daryabi said.
“I couldn’t think. I didn’t know if I would be killed or if I would live,” he said, his face and body bearing the scars.
“We call on the Taliban to immediately cease the use of force toward, and the arbitrary detention of, those exercising their right to peaceful assembly and the journalists covering the protests,” the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement on Friday.
It said that reports point to an increasing use of force by the Taliban “against those involved in or reporting on the demonstrations.”
Uncowed, Daryabi said that he would return to the street to cover another protest.”
“It’s very dangerous for me to stand up to them,” he said. “The Taliban say the media is free, but how can they say that when they are beating me and my colleagues? We cannot just stop our work.”
Daryabi and Naqdi work for the small, privately owned Etilaat Roz newspaper, which also broadcasts video news on YouTube.
In the chaotic days following the Taliban takeover of Kabul on Aug. 15, thousands of people, including women and young journalists, rushed to Kabul’s airport desperate to escape the militants’ rule. In the weeks since, women have held multiple protests for their rights, almost all of them broken up violently by Taliban fighters.
Two men were last week killed when Taliban fighters opened fire on a women’s rights protest in the western city of Herat.
Journalists have been harassed at the rallies, including another cameraman who was beaten. Despite the abuse at the hands of the Taliban, Duryabi said that he was not ready to give up on his homeland.
Meanwhile, Taliban fighters had shot dead the brother of former Afghan vice president Amrullah Saleh and his driver in northern Panjshir Province, Saleh’s nephew said yesterday.
Shuresh Saleh said that his uncle, Rohullah Azizi, was traveling in his vehicle on Thursday when Taliban fighters stopped him at a checkpoint.
“As we hear at the moment, Taliban shot him and his driver at the checkpoint,” he said.
A message left with a Taliban spokesman yesterday was not immediately returned.
Shuresh Saleh said that it was unclear where his uncle, an anti-Taliban fighter, was headed when the Taliban caught him, adding that mobile phones were not working in the area.
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