Warning: This report contains accounts of sexual assault.
By Haniya Frotan
The Taliban had been back in power in Afghanistan for barely two weeks when armed men burst into the home Shogufa Safari shared with her husband and children, assaulted and abducted her. Over the next five days, she was locked up, beaten and repeatedly raped by her Taliban captors, who she says targeted her for her work as an officer in the Afghan army.
Safari, now 28, recalls hearing her children scream in fear as she was dragged from her home by armed men, her face bloody from the beatings they had inflicted on her and her husband. They locked her up in a metal shipping container with no food or water, she says, and only released her after her family paid the Taliban 200,000 Afghanis ($2,850).
“They didn’t do anything to me during the day, but at night, the real nightmare began,” Safari told a Rukhshana Media reporter by phone from a neighbouring country where she now lives in exile with her three children.
“The first night I was whipped and beaten. But on the second and third nights there was no limit to their brutality. Three or four people attacked me and gang-raped me. They shouted that I was a Hazara infidel and a prostitute and that I deserved it.”
Safari’s voice trembles as she describes the ordeal, which led to the break-up of her marriage and a suicide attempt, and forced her to flee her home country. Although she is now in a neighbouring country, which Rukhshana is not disclosing for fear of jeopardising her safety, she still lives in fear of being forcibly returned to Afghanistan.
Asked why she had chosen to speak publicly about what happened to her after nearly four years of silence, Safari said it had been an “incredibly difficult” thing to do, but that she couldn’t stay silent when she realised other women like her had suffered similar attacks.
“One woman I knew was murdered after being raped by the Taliban. A young woman in Ghor set herself on fire,” she said. “I couldn’t stay silent any longer.”
Evidence of sexual violence against women and girls held by the Taliban has mounted in recent years. In a report last year, the UN’s special rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett, said he had received credible accounts of sexual violence meted out to women and girls in Taliban prisons and said the culture of silence and victim-blaming surrounding such attacks meant many such cases had likely gone unreported.
Rukhshana Media and the Guardian reported last July on a video showing a female protester being gang-raped and tortured by armed men in a Taliban prison, the first direct evidence of such crimes.
Revenge attacks
The Taliban pledged an amnesty for former members of the Afghan military and police when they swept to power in 2021. In fact, they began carrying out reprisals almost immediately, according to numerous reports, including by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. An investigation by The New York Times found they carried out hundreds of revenge killings in the early months of their leadership.
But while such killings are relatively well documented, incidences of gang-rape committed in reprisal for serving in the forces are less known, in part because of the consequences for survivors of speaking out in a country where rape still carries immense stigma.
Since the Taliban’s return to power, many women who served in the armed forces have told Rukhshana they fear reprisals. Safari said three of the four women who served in her unit have fled Afghanistan, while the whereabouts of the fourth is unknown.
Given the situation in Afghanistan, it’s impossible to independently verify Safari’s story, but photographs she shared with Rukhshana Media show whip marks, extensive bruising, signs of physical blows, and deep bite marks across various parts of her body.
Rukhshana spoke to a source who knows Safari and was waiting for her outside the police station when she was released. “She was completely unrecognizable — even her clothes were in tatters,” said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I wrapped her in a blanket and brought her home.”
At least 6,600 women worked in the Afghan security services before 2021, according to the previous government, and they faced both societal stigma and systemic discrimination in the institutions they joined.
Safari said she participated in security and military operations in Kabul, Nimroz, and Helmand provinces during her career. She told Rukhshana Media that her family initially opposed her decision to join the army, but eventually came to support her, and she served five years before the force was disbanded when the Taliban returned to power. When the country finally fell to the former rebel fighters, Safari and her family stayed home, not daring to venture outside for fear of retaliation.
“It was one in the morning. I had barely fallen asleep, overwhelmed by anxiety and fear, when the loud banging on our door jolted me awake,” she said of the night she was taken away. “I was terrified, my heart was pounding. When we opened the door, six or seven armed men stormed in.”
A witness to Safari’s arrest, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her children were crying loudly as she was dragged away, and her husband had been badly beaten.
A life shattered
Safari’s incarceration and gang rape, however horrific, was to be only the beginning of her ordeal.
Six months later, her husband divorced her, leaving her to take care of their three children alone in a country where women are no longer permitted even to leave the home to work.
“I lived with him for 10 years. I coped with all the hardships. But he said he was ashamed of what people said,” she said.
“His parents called me a stain and said I had taken away the honor of the family. He said, ‘You don’t need me any more, our children will be yours.’”
The trauma pushed Safari to the brink of a mental breakdown. “Every time I woke up, the images of those nights were right before my eyes,” she says.
For a year, she underwent medical treatment and psychotherapy, relying on sleeping pills and antidepressants to try to escape the nightmares. At one point, she took rat poison in an attempt to end her life, and was only saved by her family taking her to hospital, the acquaintance who met Safari outside the police station recalls.
According to women’s rights activists, the inhumane treatment of female detainees by the Taliban is part of a broader strategy to suppress and silence women.
“These women not only struggle with physical and psychological trauma, but they are also rejected by society,” says Zahra Yagana, an Afghan activist. “It’s a double catastrophe.”
Within two years of the rape, Safari knew she could no longer stay in Afghanistan. With the help of friends, she left Afghanistan with her children through smuggling routes.
Even there, she relied on antidepressants for months. She has recently stopped taking them and says her condition has improved, but she lives in constant fear of being sent back to Afghanistan.
“If I fall into the hands of the Taliban again, I won’t survive — neither will my three children,” she said. “This time, multiple lives are at risk.”
