Eight women have been released by the Taliban after being forced to give ‘guarantees’ to not protest against the de facto government nor to leave the Afghanistan, according to Zahra Haqparsat, head of the Afghanistan Women’s Unity and Solidarity Movement.
In a tweet posted Monday, Ms Haqparast said eight of her colleagues who were detained Sunday night have been released after they provided the forced guarantees.
Ms Haqparast later told Rukhshana media that Taliban armed forces had detained the women after physically beating them while they were in a house in Kabul city’s Khairkhana area.
She added that Taliban officials also called her and threatened her against continuing any protests.
While the women were detained only a short time, they were forced to make ‘false confessions’ in exchange for their release, and a commitment to never oppose the Taliban, she said.
According to Haqparast, the protesting women are extremely scared and panicked by their experience and are in a bad state both mentally and physically.
The women are understood to have been arrested while they were preparing a protest in the coming days.
Since the Taliban stepped up its suppression of women’s street protests, protesters have continued demonstrating against the de facto rulers in different forms.
Meanwhile, Khaled Zadran, the Taliban’s spokesman for Kabul police, denied the women were arrested. “On Sunday night some media and people published a videotape that seems to show that the security forces in the Khairkhana area of Kabul carried out an operation and arrested a number of women,” he tweeted. “Such an event has not happened in the mentioned area in recent days.”
He accused the media of spreading fake news and said that the media should be cautious and prevent the publication of unreliable news.
Afghan women and girls have protested more than 200 separate occasions against the Taliban in the past two years.
According to a Rukhshana Media investigation, the Taliban has arrested at least 70 of the protesting women and girls and tortured some of them in prisons over the past two years.
