Amnesty International: Women’s lives are destroyed in Afghanistan because of the Taliban

Amnesty International said in a report published on Wednesday that the lives of women and girls in Afghanistan are being devastated by the Taliban’s brutal campaign against their rights.

Since returning to power, the Taliban have restricted women’s and girls’ rights to education, work, and freedom of movement.

More than 100 Afghan women and girls were interviewed for the report, “Death is Slow,” which reveals how the Taliban threaten, detain, torture and forcibly disappear those who dare to protest these restrictions.

One of the women recounted her experience in a Taliban prison, saying: “The Taliban guards kept coming to my room and showing pictures of members of my family. They kept saying ‘we can kill them’.”

Another woman told Amnesty International: “We were beaten, they did it to us so we couldn’t show it to the world.”

In the report, a young woman said that she was arbitrarily detained and subsequently tortured with electric shocks for appearing in public with a man not considered a mahram.

According to Amnesty International’s research, child marriage rates are on the rise under the Taliban, and the main contributing factors are said to be war, poverty, drought and deprivation of education.

The British-based human rights organization called on the international community to respond to this repression by imposing 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,” said Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International.

“If the international community fails to act, it will abandon the women and girls of Afghanistan and undermine human rights everywhere,” she added.