At the end of January 2022, 25-year-old Tamana Zaryab Paryani was arrested in Kabul and imprisoned. For three weeks, she was brutally tortured, abused, and interrogated. She is now telling her story to DW.
To this day, courageous women in Afghanistan continue to demonstrate against the curtailment of their rights by the Taliban
“I had my mouth bandaged, feet and hands tied. My legs were held and one of the prison guards beat the soles of my feet with a wire. Sometimes they put my feet in the water and shocked me with electric wires until I passed out. Also they put a plastic bag over my head, which they only took away shortly before I died of suffocation,” says Tamana Zaryab Paryani.
In January 2022, the 25-year-old was arrested in Kabul in the middle of the night and jailed plugged. For three weeks, she was brutally tortured, abused, and interrogated. Her three younger sisters ended up in prison with her. Tamana had previously organized demonstrations against Taliban rule.
New rules for women
In the eyes of the Taliban, Tamana violated their new laws, above all by publicly burning a burqa, because since taking power in August 2021, women are no longer allowed to actively participate in political and social life. Since then, the self-realization of all women has been severely restricted. All women must veil themselves. In Kabul and other cities, the Taliban put up posters comparing unveiled women to animals.
Tamana (3rd from left) and her sisters – they were held by the Taliban for more than three weeks in January 2022
Tamana Zaryab Paryani studied law and worked as a journalist for a newspaper before the Taliban took power. Like many other women in Kabul, she did not accept these new Taliban regulations. She was one of the organizers of protests by hundreds of women in early September 2021, which the Taliban brutally met with beatings, gun violence and detention of the participants.
Tamana himself was not immediately arrested. It was only months later that armed Taliban fighters forced their way into her apartment, where she lived with her three sisters. Tamana quick-wittedly filmed the forced entry and shared the images on Facebook. Her arrest was followed by many people all over the world – it was probably this call for help that ultimately saved her and her sisters' lives. But she didn't know that at the time.
Her sisters Zarmina, Shafiqa and Kerishma were arrested the same night as Tamana and taken to the same prison. However, the sisters did not have any contact with each other. They too were brutally tortured for 26 days. “I had never thought about death before,” says 17-year-old Shafiqa. “I was of an age when such a thought was foreign to me. But since I was captured by the Taliban, I could think of nothing else.”
Tamana Zaryap Paryani worked as a journalist for an Afghan newspaper before the Taliban took power
In February 2022, after growing pressure from aid organizations and human rights activists, the Taliban released a large number of demonstrators from prisons in exchange for financial guarantees. The women had to hand over documents of their homes and possessions to the Taliban and from then on were not allowed to take part in protests, speak to the media or engage in politics. Tamana and her sisters were allowed to return home on February 13, 2022 and saw how the ban on traveling alone without a male companion, the exclusion of girls and women from school and university attendance and the strict obligation to wear the veil were increasingly curtailing women's rights were.
Help from abroad
The news of the detention of Tamana and her sisters sparked widespread reactions on social media.
The video of the arrest that Tamana recorded drew the attention of many people to the fate of the sisters – in Germany, for example, the Kabul Airlift, the editors of the women's magazine EMMA and the Society for International Cooperation GIZ. Tamana and a total of ten people The family were able to emigrate to Germany via Pakistan at the beginning of October 2022 and have been settling in here for the rest of their lives ever since.
It is now a year since the horrors of prison, but Tamana, Shafiqa, Kerishma and Zarmina have not yet come to terms with the weeks of torment. They suffer from anxiety and bad nightmares. “In the cell where we were locked up, I heard the screams of other women and girls,” says Shafiqa: “The screams are still ringing in my ears to this day. I'm shaking and I have goosebumps.” Even a year later, the youngest sister remembers very clearly how she feared that every breath could be her last.
The sisters know that they are safe in Germany and that they were very lucky. But thousands and thousands of women and men are still trapped in the “Taliban terror in Afghanistan”, they suffer in fear and terror every day and fear for their lives, they emphasize. But they also learn that they themselves have been in Germany since their arrival being overwhelmed with hateful accusations from Taliban sympathizers living here, to the point of being threatened.
- more University ban: Afghanistan's disenfranchised women
Farewell forever?
A woman in burqa exits a university in Kandahar province. She will not be allowed to return: In a government statement on Tuesday, the Islamist Taliban instructed all private and public universities in Afghanistan to ban women from attending universities. All female students will be expelled from the universities with immediate effect.
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Women must stay outside
The day after the university was banned, the Taliban controlled the entrance to a university in Kabul: female students had to stay outside. The ban applies for an indefinite period. But there are already protests at the universities: male fellow students failed an exam, professors resigned their work.
- University ban: Afghanistan's disenfranchised women
Higher education? Purely for men
There were restrictions before that: after the Taliban took power in August 2021, the universities had to separate entrances and classrooms by gender. Women could only be taught by other women or old men. Here is a curtained off area for female students at Kandahar University.
- University ban: Afghanistan's disenfranchised women
The last of their kind
These graduates from Benawa University Kandahar were able to graduate in computer science in March. The recent restriction of women's rights has been heavily criticized internationally: the human rights organization Human Rights Watch called the university ban a “shameful decision”, and the UN described it as a human rights violation.
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“Devastating impact on the country's future”
As recently as October, thousands of girls and women had taken entrance exams for universities, like this one at Kabul University. Many of them wanted to study teaching subjects or medicine. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that the ban on universities “not only violates equal rights for women, but will also have devastating effects.”
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No educational opportunities for girls
The ban on going to university is another restriction on educational opportunities for women and girls: for a long time now, in most of the country, teenage girls have not been allowed to attend secondary schools from the seventh grade onwards. Lucky for these girls heading to school in eastern Afghanistan: some provinces away from Taliban power centers are ignoring the ban.
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Land of invisible women
Girls and women are largely excluded from public life. For several months they have not been allowed to visit fitness studios and parks in Kabul. This amusement park in the capital is also taboo for visitors. The Taliban justified the ban by saying that regulations on gender separation were not observed and that women did not wear the mandatory headscarf.
Dystopia becomes reality
Women collect saffron flowers in Herat province. They are allowed to do this work, unlike most other jobs. Since taking power, the Taliban have issued numerous regulations that massively restrict the lives of women and girls: They are forbidden to travel without a male companion, and they have to wear a hijab or burqa outside their home.
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“Shame on the world”
Many Afghan women do not want to accept the abolition of their rights: women demonstrate here in Kabul in November. “The terrible situation of Afghan women is a shame for the world,” reads one poster. The public protest requires a lot of courage: the demonstrators risk flogging and imprisonment. Women's rights activists are being persecuted in Afghanistan.
With tears in Zarmina worries about the other demonstrators in Afghanistan, who have not been able to leave the country like she did. Many of the girls who were sexually abused in prison have committed suicide out of fear for their reputation and that of their families, she reports.
“We fought for justice and equality, we made sacrifices,” Tamana says of her time in Afghanistan. “But we also suffer here for our compatriots in our homeland.”
When Tamana looks to the future, she fears an even “more brutal, even more cruel Taliban rule.” Together with her sisters, she appeals to the international community not to forget the women in Afghanistan, despite the difficult situation of women in Iran and Ukraine.