Taliban’s Hidden Carnage: Hundreds Dead in Femicide Wave

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A shocking new research on the prevalence of violence against women in Afghanistan reveals that the cases of more than 300 women being killed by men since the Taliban took over in 2021 following the withdrawal of the US-led military coalition from the country are just the “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the true scale of gender-based violence in Afghanistan.

Open source investigators at the Center of Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project examined social media and news sites. They recorded 332 reported cases of femicide since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

The analysis is one of the first attempts to collect and comb through data on the level of sexual and physical violence against women in Afghanistan. It also discovered that 840 Afghan women and girls had been subject to gender-based violence from January 1, 2022 — when the Afghan Witness project began collating data — to June 30 this year, or almost one instance of abuse a day.

More than half of the reported cases of violence against women and girls were perpetrated by the Taliban. Analysis of crimes for which Taliban officials are responsible revealed 115 incidents of sexual violence, including forced marriage, sexual slavery, assault, and rape.

Another 73 incidents concerned non-sexual violence and torture, while another 113 involved the reported arrests of women, several for violating the Taliban regime’s repressive policies against women and girls, which include forbidding them from traveling significant distances without a male guardian.

The Taliban’s shutdown of most independent media outlets, persisting political repression, and widespread persecution of journalists means the number of cases of gender-based violence reported is likely to be a vast underestimation of the true scale of death and violence inflicted on Afghan women and girls, says David Osborn, the director of the Afghan Witness project.

“What we have collected is only the tip of the iceberg,” Osborn said. “[It is] more and more difficult for Afghan women to speak out and for us to document gender-based violence and the impact of Taliban rule on women and girls.”

This is made worse by online intimidation by the Taliban against its critics and cases involving prominent Afghan female personalities and social media influencers. Hora Sadat, a popular Afghan female YouTuber who built a huge social media following for her videos about life in Afghanistan, was allegedly poisoned after attending a private event in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on August 21, 2023.

Although the Taliban arrested a man and a woman in connection to her mysterious death, some women’s rights activists believe the Taliban may have been responsible for her death. However, there is still no evidence of their involvement.

In the three years since the Taliban took over the country following the collapse of the US-backed government in 2021, the Taliban have imposed what human rights groups and activists call a “gender apartheid” on Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls, excluding them from almost every aspect of public life and denying them access to the justice system.

The Afghan Witness project’s open-source data analysis also chronicled how public protests against the Taliban have dropped significantly over the past three years and how the Taliban regime has further tightened certain restrictions against women and girls over the past year.

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