The Guardian has seen video proof of a feminine Afghan human rights activist being gang-raped and tortured in a Taliban jail by armed males.
There have been mounting stories that sexual violence is being inflicted on ladies and ladies being held in detention in Afghanistan, however this video is believed to be the primary direct proof of those crimes occurring.
In accordance with the activist, the cell phone footage was later despatched to her as a risk that it might be shared extra extensively if she continued to talk out towards the Taliban regime.
Within the video recording considered by the Guardian, the younger girl is filmed being instructed to take off her garments and is then raped a number of instances by two males.
The girl within the video – recorded on a cellphone by one of many armed males – tries to cowl her face along with her palms. One of many males pushes her laborious when she hesitates as he offers her orders.
At one level she is instructed, “You’ve been fucked by Individuals all these years and now it’s our flip.”
The girl has mentioned that she was arrested for participating in a public protest towards the Taliban and was raped whereas being held in detention in a Taliban jail. She has since fled Afghanistan. She mentioned that after she spoke out towards the Taliban in exile, she was despatched the video and instructed that if she continued to criticise the regime the video could be despatched to her household and launched on social media.
“In case you proceed saying something dangerous towards the Islamic Emirate, we’ll publish your video,” she mentioned she was instructed.
She believes that the assault was intentionally recorded for use to silence and disgrace her. The particular person filming the assault captures her standing bare along with her face seen and she or he is identifiable in the course of the assaults.
Final week the Guardian revealed accounts of teenage ladies and younger ladies who mentioned that they had been sexually assaulted and crushed after being detained beneath Afghanistan’s draconian hijab legal guidelines.
In a single case, a girl’s physique was allegedly present in a canal a couple of weeks after she had been taken into custody by Taliban militants, with a supply near her household saying she had been sexually abused earlier than her loss of life.
The UN’s particular rapporteur on Afghanistan has just lately reported that ladies had been regarded as going through sexual violence in detention.
Since they took energy in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed what human rights teams are calling a “gender apartheid” on Afghanistan’s 14 million ladies and ladies, excluding them from nearly each facet of public life. Ladies and ladies are blocked from attending secondary college, banned from nearly each type of paid employment, prevented them from strolling in public parks, attending gyms or magnificence salons and instructed to adjust to a strict gown code.
The Taliban have additionally introduced the reintroduction of the general public flogging and stoning of girls for adultery.
The Guardian and Rukhshana Media spoke with a number of different feminine protestors and activists who’ve additionally come ahead to allege that they’ve been tortured and crushed after being arrested for calling for ladies’s rights.
Zarifa Yaqubi, 30, mentioned she was imprisoned for 41 days in November 2022, after making an attempt to organise a motion for Afghan ladies.
“They gave electrical shocks and hit components of my physique with cables in order that I’d not be capable of present in entrance of the digital camera tomorrow,” she mentioned, including that she had been tortured into admitting to taking cash from foreigners to protest towards the Taliban.
Parwana Nejarabi, 23, mentioned she was crushed and given electrical shocks after being detained by Taliban forces when protesting for ladies’s rights in early 2022. She mentioned she spent a month in solitary confinement and was proven a letter with an order for her to be stoned to loss of life. “I might hear them saying, ‘She ought to be killed,’” she mentioned. She was launched after a compelled confession and fled Afghanistan to dwell in exile.
Regardless of the large dangers to their security, ladies inside Afghanistan are nonetheless staging public protests and criticising the Taliban regime, with Rukhshana Media recording at the least 221 acts of protest by ladies and ladies over the previous two years.
A spokesperson for the Taliban, Zabhullah Mujahid, denied the allegations of the widespread sexual assaults on ladies in jail.
Heather Barr, affiliate director of the ladies’s rights division at Human Rights Watch mentioned the Taliban proceed to behave with “full impunity for abuses, significantly behind the jail partitions.”
“The Taliban are conscious of how a lot stigma is concerned across the subject of sexual violence in Afghanistan and the way extremely tough – and often not possible – it’s for victims of sexual violence to come back ahead and inform their tales, even generally to their very own households, as a result of there’s a threat of disgrace and probably ‘honour’ violence,” mentioned Barr.
The UN particular rapporteur on the scenario of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, mentioned: “I’m alarmed by stories of torture and ill-treatment in Afghanistan, together with allegations of sexual violence in detention, particularly of girls. We’re persevering with to look into these stories and to determine the info.”
Earlier this week, Taliban officers took half in a particular assembly on Afghanistan hosted by the UN in Doha to debate the nation’s future. No Afghan ladies had been current on the assembly and girls’s rights weren’t included on the agenda.
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