The lives of women and girls in Afghanistan are being devastated by the Taliban’s savage crackdown on their rights, Amnesty International says in a new report.
Since returning to power, the Taliban have restricted women’s and girls’ rights to education, work and free movement.
More than a hundred Afghan women and girls were interviewed for the report, titled Death in Slow Motion, which reveals how the Taliban threatens, detains, tortures and forcibly ‘disappears’ those who dare to protest against these restrictions.
“(The Taliban guards) kept coming to my room and showing me pictures of my family,” one woman said of her experience in a Taliban prison.
“They kept repeating … ‘We can kill them’.”
Another woman told Amnesty: “We were beaten on our breasts and between the legs. They did this to us so that we couldn’t show the world.”
In the report, a young woman said she was detained arbitrarily and later tortured with “electric shocks” for appearing in public with a man who does not qualify as mahram – a male chaperone.
According to Amnesty research, the rates of child marriage are surging under Taliban rule.
The key contributing factors to the trend are said to be war, poverty, drought and denial of education.
The UK-based rights group called on the international community to impose targeted sanctions such as travel bans on Taliban leaders to hold them accountable.
“The Taliban are deliberately depriving millions of women and girls of their human rights, and subjecting them to systematic discrimination,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said.
“If the international community fails to act, it will be abandoning women and girls in Afghanistan, and undermining human rights everywhere.”
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