By Ellaha Rasa
Khadija Salehi spent seven years working in Afghanistan’s Attorney-General’s Office. But the former prosecutor now lives in fear of being murdered by the men she put away.
“After the government fell and the prisoners were released; The first verbal threat I received was ‘I will not leave you alive and if I catch you, I will blow you up or destroy you’,” she says.
She has become a prisoner in her own home, only leaving to move to different locations twice a month to minimize the risk of attack.
“We national security prosecutors have been taken hostage because we cannot leave our homes,” she says. “There is always the risk of attack by Taliban forces and released prisoners. It is an indescribable feeling.”
When the Taliban seized power two years ago, taking swift control of towns and cities across Afghanistan, one of its first priorities was to open the gates of prisons. Taliban militants were released immediately. Common criminals also walked free. A total of 36,000 prisoners are believed to have been let out.
Statistics provided by the Afghan Prosecutors Association suggest all prosecutors could be in the crosshairs of revenge attacks.
Since August 2021, when the Taliban toppled the former government, 30 prosecutors have been murdered. Eleven have been injured in attacks.
The attacks have taken place in 20 provinces, but the most dangerous area by far is Kabul, with 18 known incidents.
While a small minority of prosecutors were women, they feel especially vulnerable. Three women have been murdered and four injured.
Even under the previous government, it was dangerous to be a prosecutor. The problem then was attacks by terrorist groups, including the Taliban. During the 20 years of “republican” rule, officials registered 133 killings of prosecutors and more than 200 injuries.
It was during this period that women gained the chance to train and work in courts. Khadija Salehi says higher education for women was still frowned on in her hometown in Logar province, but support from her family won through.
“With my father’s insistence, I got permission to go to school and university,” Khadija Salehi says. “And after graduation, I started working as a military prosecutor.”
In her last three years before the Taliban takeover, she was an investigative prosecutor in the internal and external security crimes prosecution in Kabul province. She says of the 40 cases she investigated then, more than half related to terrorist groups … among them, members of the Taliban.
As a woman from a rural province, she understands how the Taliban views her.
“During the republic, a number of our relatives who were members of the Taliban group were caught by the security prosecutor’s office and sentenced to sixteen and eighteen years in prison,” she says. “Those people thought that the reason for their arrest and trial was the prosecutors.”
She told friends and family that she was leaving Afghanistan for fear of retaliation. In reality, she has remained there for two years, living in fear and apprehension.
Sharifa Asghar Massood spent 20 years in the Afghanistan’s Attorney General’s Office. Her last job was as a prosecutor supervising civil and military investigations, as well as working as an accident and database manager.
She’s concerned she may never be allowed to work again.
“Under the rule of the Taliban, there is no hope of returning to duty for women prosecutors of the previous government,” she says.
Fearing she might be attacked in her home by Taliban forces or released prisoners, she and her family stay in the homes of family and friends.
Sharifa has not received a threatening message. But the assassination of her colleagues has left her in no doubt she’s in danger.
“My colleagues, male and female, were attacked and killed,” she says. “I live with the fear that that the [Taliban] may have ordered their fighters to identify the female prosecutors in the previous government and hunt them down.”
Amina Hemmat has a master’s degree in jurisprudence and law from Kabul University. She says August 14, 2021 was the end of her three-year career as a sentence enforcement prosecutor in Afghanistan’s Attorney General’s Office.
“Prosecutors with higher education entered this profession, but suddenly after many years of sacrifice they were sentenced to isolation from society,” she says. “It’s had a destructive economic, spiritual and psychological effect on these women.”
Masooma worked for four years as a prosecutor combating crimes against women in the General Attorney’s Office, but when the government fell to the hands of the Taliban, she lost all her dreams of working in the office.
Every month, she has prosecuted about 30 cases of murder, sexual assault, self-immolation and suicide in the city of Kabul. Among the most challenging cases of her career were the sexual and physical abuse of female football players in 2019.
Masooma, who left her home on the first day of the fall of Kabul to escape the Taliban’s revenge, claims armed men entered her home and violently harassed her father to try to find her..
“After two months of their rule [Taliban], armed men entered the house and tortured my father,” she says. “They said you must show where your daughter is because she worked in the infidel system and must answer to our office.”
He was arrested but later released from the Taliban prison with the help of neighbourhood elders.
Masooma left Afghanistan a month ago for fear of revenge and currently lives in a neighboring country. She says with a choked voice, “The two years of living under the rule of the Taliban group were the hardest and darkest period of my life, because of the fear of being recognized by the Taliban and criminals released from the prison. I used to go to the bazaar covered from head to toe, in a burqua. I get emotional and cry when I remember those moments. This situation is very painful for me as a female prosecutor.”
The Taliban abolished the Attorney General’s Office, replacing it with the Directorate of Prosecution of Verdicts and Decrees.
The Afghan Prosecutors Association, sending a statement in response to Rukhshana Media’s email, writes that Afghanistan is the only country that does not have a judicial system in the Attorney General’s Office. It says the move is a huge blow to the judicial system and fair trials.
Matiullah Shahab, the head of interior relations of the Afghan Prosecutors’ Association, considers this action of the Taliban to be a disaster for law enforcement. He says Attorney Genera’s Office defended the people’s rights, while the new directorate implements Taliban rulings on defenseless people.
Around 2,000 female prosecutors and judges who worked in the Attorney General’s Office have become unemployed.
“Taliban’s belief and customs, misogyny and patriarchy are the main reasons for excluding women,” Mr. Shahab says. “They do not fully consider more than half of Afghan society. They do not consider women as a social force.”
(We have used pseudonyms to protect the security of women interviewed for this story)
