By Kreshma Fakhri
In early December, Maryam*, a former police officer, set fire to her uniform and 6-year career in a courtyard in the outskirts of Kabul.
Since the Taliban took over Kabul on August 15, she and her five children have been in hiding.
As she changes her hideout from one neighborhood in Kabul, her family poses as an internally displaced family from northern Afghanistan.
The 40-year-old mother of five worked as a policewoman in Khost, Logar, Panjshir, and Laghman provinces, a job that puts her life at risk under the Taliban.
With the Taliban hunting down former Afghan security forces and her job loss, Maryam is caught in an inescapable situation.
“I don’t have enough food, water, and medicine. [In the past five months] we spent our savings, and I sold household items to feed my children,” she told Rukhshana Media.
According to the United Nations World Food Program, 98 percent of Afghans do not have enough to eat, with nearly 23 million people facing extreme levels of hunger.
Hunger is not the only immediate danger that threatens Maryam and her family.
She says her family can’t even flee the situation because they don’t have passports. “Since the collapse, we have no place to stay and no way to flee!” she said.
When she heard some of her former colleagues went missing after undergoing biometric requirements at the passport office, she decided not to risk her life.
Maryam is not the only one to share the concern about the biometric system used to identify former Afghan security forces.
Rukhshana Media spoke to 10 former security personnel for this story, all of whom said they couldn’t flee the country because they feared being arrested by the Taliban when applying for a passport.
A relative of a former police officer who spoke in condition of anonymity told Rukhshana Media that Bilal* and his two colleagues were arrested by the Taliban when they went to the passport office in Kabul.
“He called the night the Taliban arrested him. With the mediation of the elders and providing guarantees, he was released after two nights,” the relative said.
Soon after the Taliban took over in August, the news of their access to the biometric data became a source of constant fear for those who worked with the Afghan government, particularly the Afghan Interior and Defence ministers.
The US-supported program to collect fingerprints, iris scans, and facial images of Afghan national security forces since 2002, to prevent the Taliban and criminals infiltration of the security forces.
But since 2016, the Afghan Interior and Defence ministers have been using a US-funded database, the Afghan Personnel and Pay System, paying the national army and police to counter corruption, according to MIT Technology Review.
According to the MIT Technology Review report, the Afghan Personnel and Pay System “contains some half a million records about every member of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.”
Nasrin*, who worked in the police force for nine years, claims that at least 13 people who worked in the security forces are missing from her neighborhood in west Kabul.
“After undergoing biometrics in the passport office in Kabul, they never return home, and no one knows about their whereabouts,” she told Rukhshana Media.
When the Taliban retook control in August, they announced a “general amnesty” for the government employees, including those who worked in the Afghan security forces.
But soon, the dead bodies of those who worked with the former government, especially in security forces, kept turning up across the country.
In a report released on November 30, the Human Rights Watch documented the killings and the forceful disappearance of security personnel. “Taliban forces in Afghanistan have summarily executed or forcibly disappeared more than 100 former police and intelligence officers in just four provinces since taking over the country,” the report said.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said in late January that the UN received “credible allegations” about the killing of more than 100 former members of the Afghan government and its security forces since the Taliban took over.
Gulali*, another former policewoman, said the real number of security personnel killed or disappeared is high because the families can’t dare to report it due to the environment of fear and repression.
*The name of the interviewees have changed to protect their identity.
