A young journalist who escaped Afghanistan returns a year later, by reote, to report the reality for the women left behind

There has been a small but steady wave of recent stories focused on the plight of women in Afghanistan, who have been stripped of their rights — to jobs, to education, to choosing their wardrobe or having their hair uncovered in public, to having a voice in their lives in public and, often, at home — since U.S. troops left the country and the Taliban reclaimed power last year. The point was made without equivocation in the third paragraph of a story by Bushra Seddique, an Afghan refugee who is an editorial assistant at The Atlantic:

Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

Seddique was born in 1999; she was a toddler when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. For all the cost and controversy of America’s 20-year war, Seddique said the overthrow of the Taliban in was “the beginning of a luckier time” for girls like her. That contrasted with the lives of their mothers and grandmothers, who spent most of their lives in the “unblessed years.”

Seddique’s next sentence:

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history.

When I clicked on the Atlantic story, I expected to do a quick scan and move on. But as the story went on, my reading slowed and paid closer attention. Then I went back for a reread. It’s not long — just 29 paragraphs, some fat, some a single line. The approach is direct and transparent, starting with the headline: WHAT AFGHANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW. The story spine is built on interviews Seddique did with relatives, friends, former teachers and colleagues back home. The structure is unadorned — two-graf anecdote, the one-sentence story theme, a few grafs of personal introduction, then brief scenes from the interviews — was graced with lines or short clauses that made my breath catch:

A 14-year-old girl who loved school now watches through the window as her younger brother boards the school bus each morning. “Are the Taliban at war with women?” she asks Seddique through tears. A 22-year-old woman teaches a secret school in her basement to as many as 80 teenage girls and wishes she had room for more; the 14-year-old dreams of finding a secret school even it if means getting caught and beaten by the Taliban. Illiterate women joined university professors at a recent protest in Kabul in which women demanded BREAD, WORK, FREEDOM. Seddique’s sister loved colorful clothes, lipstick and eyeliner; all those now languish in her bedroom because women who venture outside the home must wear head-to-toe black “like the whole nation is in mourning.” The return to “zero” for Afghan women, who are “so very tired.”

While Seddique uses the first person for credibility and transparency, she turns this story over to others. Her sadness is apparent but never self-absorbed. It is instructive to read her piece about how she and her youngest sister escaped in the chaos of the U.S. troop pullout a year ago. That story is a pure first-person narrative — the family vote about who would stay and who would go, days of tension on a bus with other escapees, wading through a sewage-infected pond, ambivalence about the U.S., ambivalence about the best ways to fight for her family and country, the growing realization that she had no real choice:

I was a journalist and a woman stuck in a country now ruled by terrorists who hated journalists and women.

In that story, Seddique makes five quick mentions of the dangerous decisions she made to keep her laptop even as the Taliban, and then the Americans, required escaping refugees to jettison everything else. After months in holding camps, she and her sister move in with relatives already in the U.S. and she gets a fellowship with The Atlantic, doing work “the Taliban would never let women and girls do.” She ends her personal journey tale a line that should haunt and inspire all journalists:

I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban and carried it across continents to a free country so I could write this story, so I could tell you this.

That story was published just a month ago. Now Seddique returns by remote to Afghanistan to face what she left behind. She takes us on the ground in women’s lives and dares us to see what she feels. At the close, Seddique gives two grafs over to possible policy solutions involving economic and politics sanctions and human-rights efforts. It is a careful consideration, as clear and unpretentious as the rest of the piece. She makes no mention of a return to war but suggests more funding for secret schools, with a plea that is more a sign than a scream:

In secret, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.

I would have suggested stopping the story there. Seddique adds one more paragraph, two short, parallel sentences contrasting the despair of a woman still in Afghanistan with her own dim glimmer of hope. But I might be wrong. And as an editor, I believe the tie goes to the writer.

The post Personal stories on what Afghan women want the rest of us to know first appeared on Future Afghanistan.

The 43-page report, “‘Even If You Go to the Skies, We’ll Find You’: LGBT People in Afghanistan After the Taliban Takeover,” is based on 60 interviews with LGBT Afghans. Many reported that Taliban members attacked or threatened them because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Others reported abuse from family members, neighbors, and romantic partners who now support the Taliban or believed they had to act against LGBT people close to them to ensure their own safety. Some fled their homes from attacks by Taliban members or supporters pursuing them. Others watched lives they had carefully built over the years disappear overnight and found themselves at risk of being targeted at any time because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“We spoke with LGBT Afghans who have survived gang rape, mob attacks, or have been hunted by their own family members who joined the Taliban, and they have no hope that state institutions will protect them,” said J. Lester Feder, senior fellow for emergency research at OutRight Action International. “For those LGBT people who want to flee the country, there are few good options; most of Afghanistan’s neighbors also criminalize same-sex relations. It is difficult to overstate how devastating – and terrifying – the return of Taliban rule has been for LGBT Afghans.”

Most interviewees were in Afghanistan, while others had fled to nearby countries. In addition to worrying about these countries’ laws against same-sex relations, interviewees outside Afghanistan lacked proper immigration status, so were at risk of being summarily deported.

Afghanistan was a dangerous place for LGBT people well before the Taliban retook full control of the country on August 15, 2021. In 2018, the government of then-President Ashraf Ghani passed a law that explicitly criminalized same-sex sexual relations, and the previous penal code included vague language widely interpreted as making same-sex relations a criminal offense. LGBT people interviewed had experienced many abuses because of their sexual orientation or gender identity prior to the Taliban’s return to power, including sexual violence, child and forced marriage, physical violence from their families and others, expulsion from schools, blackmail, and being outed. Many were forced to conceal key aspects of their identity from society and from family, friends, and colleagues.

However, when the Taliban, who had been in power from 1996 to late 2001, regained control of the country, the situation dramatically worsened. The Taliban reaffirmed the previous government’s criminalization of same-sex relations, and some of its leaders vowed to take a hard line against the rights of LGBT people. A Taliban spokesperson told Reuters in October, “LGBT… That’s against our Sharia [Islamic] law.”

A Taliban judge told the German tabloid Bild shortly before the fall of Kabul, “For homosexuals, there can only be two punishments: either stoning, or he must stand behind a wall that will fall down on him.” A manual issued by the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue in 2020 states that religious leaders shall prohibit same-sex relations and that “strong allegations” of homosexuality shall be referred to the ministry’s district manager for adjudication and punishment.

A gay man said that Taliban members detained him at a checkpoint, beat him, and gang-raped him, telling him, “From now on anytime we want to be able to find you, we will. And we will do whatever we want with you.” A lesbian said that after the Taliban takeover, her male relatives joined the Taliban and threatened to kill her because of her sexual orientation.

Most people interviewed believed their only path to safety was asylum in a country with greater protections for LGBT people, but very few LGBT Afghans escaping Afghanistan are known to have reached a safe country. Only the United Kingdom has publicly announced that it has resettled a small number of LGBT Afghans. Organizations assisting LGBT Afghans say that hundreds of people have contacted them, seeking international protection and resettlement.

“The Taliban have explicitly pledged not to respect LGBT Afghans rights,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s critically important for concerned governments to urgently put pressure on the Taliban to respect the rights of LGBT people, ensure that assistance they provide Afghanistan reaches LGBT people, and recognize that LGBT Afghans seeking asylum face a special risk of persecution in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.”

Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. In this context, marked by systematic abuse of power combined with virulent anti-LGBT sentiment, Taliban officials and their supporters have carried out acts of violence against LGBT people with impunity.

The post Afghanistan’s LGBT Population Targeted Amid Taliban Crackdown first appeared on Future Afghanistan.