Hundreds of Afghan citizens and civil society groups are demanding the Taliban release political prisoners who have not committed crimes.
More than 920 Afghan citizens and 24 political and civil movements called on the Taliban to change its “fundamentalist and fascist” practices of suppression and unconditionally release the detained citizens, in a statement sent to media on Sunday.
They described the Taliban’s arbitrary arrests of civil activists, women’s rights activists, and journalists as a form of oppression.
It outlined the Taliban’s regime as being defined by a lack of freedom of thought, belief and expression.
The statement said that the suppression mechanism of the “fundamentalist and fascist rule of the Taliban” is done through paying and hiring people to identify political activists, and continues with threats, imprisonment, murders, and applying pressure through fear such as through the reports of conditions in its dreaded prisons.
The statement also called on the people of Afghanistan to unite and fight for the release of the Taliban’s political prisoners and its forms of suppression.
The signatories to the statement said they will use all political and civil possibilities to pressure the Taliban to immediately release the political prisoners.
The prisoners named in the statement include women’s rights activists Manizha Siddiqi and Parisa Azada, university professors Rasul Parsi, Asif Da’i, and Fahim Azimi, and journalists Sultan Ali Jawadi, Abdul Rahim Mohammadi, Safiullah Wafa, Zamir Zahir, Mohammadyar Majroh and Ghulam Ali Wahdat.
