By Ghazaal Mohammadi and Zahra Joya
In the end, it was her own relatives who reported her to the Taliban.
Somaiya, 26, wasn’t surprised when her Instagram posts – photos and videos of her daily life and promotions for local businesses –- attracted the attention of local authorities. When she was summoned to the Taliban’s vice and virtue department in the Afghan city of Herat, she hoped she’d be given a warning and told to stop. Instead, she was interrogated, then taken to Herat’s women’s prison.
During her interrogation, she says, officials told her she’d been reported by her relatives, who she knew disapproved of her social media activity. Some of them wanted her to remain in detention and had even said that she should spend years in prison.
“I kept saying I would sign a written pledge that I would no longer post my photographs. I begged and pleaded with them, but they took me to prison and said I had to be detained for 72 hours,” says Somaiya.
Eventually, Somaiya was taken back to the vice and virtue department, where she was forced to sign a pledge to stop all her social media activity. She’s now deleted all her content, including the paid promotions that had allowed her to earn a little money.
Somaiya had always been careful about what she posted on social media. She knew her activities were being monitored by Afghanistan’s feared morality police, so she wore a headscarf in her videos and avoided making comments that might cause trouble for herself and her family.
She doesn’t say who she thinks reported her to the authorities, but she references a word often used to justify the control of women within families: “ghairat”, a concept of family honour that is bound up with the protection of female relatives.
“They have used ‘ghairat’ as an excuse to object to my images,” she says.
Social media is a lifeline for many women in Afghanistan. For some, it’s their only means of earning money to live since the Taliban banned women from accessing most forms of employment; for others, it’s a way of staying in touch with an outside world they now rarely see in real life.
Before her arrest a year ago, 18-year-old Aliya had about 60,000 followers on Instagram. Like Somaiya, she posted videos about her daily life in Herat and used her account to make small sums of money promoting local businesses, like restaurants or clothing companies.
She was detained while making a promotional video for Instagram in the city, and like Somaiya, she was taken to the Herat vice and virtue office for fingerprinting, then transferred to prison.
“They told me that even if I wore a mask, it was not acceptable for me to work and advertise,” she says, referring to the new requirement that women cover their faces in public. “They said Islam does not say that a woman should appear on television or on a screen, and that this was considered a crime.”
Aliya says she came under scrutiny after posting a video that went viral of herself proffering a Father’s Day cake at her family home. After she was detained, she was transferred to the women’s prison in Herat, where she spent three difficult nights.
“Every evening, I would feel so depressed,” she says. “If I had stayed there for a month or two, I think I would have gone mad. I couldn’t remember anything – not my mother’s face, not my father’s face. I would force myself to close my eyes and try to remember their faces, but I couldn’t.”
After three nights in detention, Aliya was released on condition she sign a pledge not to use social media again.
Herat, home to a large Shiite Muslim population and once one of the more liberal cities in Afghanistan, has experienced some of the strictest crackdowns on women’s behaviour since the Taliban’s return to power five years ago.
Earlier this year, dozens of women were detained in Herat for allegedly violating dress rules, sparking public protests that were forcefully put down by the Taliban.
But women in the capital Kabul have also faced restrictions on their social media activities.
A year after the Taliban forced women to stay at home, Kabul resident Soraiya, 27, began selling women’s nightwear and underwear online.
She used Facebook and Instagram to advertise, posting AI-generated photographs of women wearing the underwear.
At first, her business did well. Then she received an order from a customer who said she could not provide an address and asked Soraiya to give an address where she could collect the order.
Soraiya hadn’t received such a request before, but she agreed to share her address. Less than an hour later, two Taliban officials knocked on the door of her family home.
They took her father to a police station and forced him to promise that his daughter would stop posting.
“They said horrible things to my father,” she says. “They told him, ‘You have no honour. Your daughter posts naked pictures of women in their underwear on Facebook.’”
“When my father came back from the police station, he severely reprimanded me. He said, ‘You have brought shame on me. You must delete all your social media pages and never do this again.’” she says.
Soraiya says that if the Taliban had not intervened, her father would never have imposed restrictions on her.
She has since created a private account, but even that is a worry. “I have a personal page now, but I keep it secret and live in fear,” she says. “I don’t know what will happen. I have lost hope in life.”
