Asia-Pacific
House-to-house Raids by the Taliban: Women Are Once Again Their Target
The misogynistic Taliban regime has once again started a house-to-house operation in Kabul. This operation, which began on October 20, 2024 by the intelligence forces and the Taliban police, is intended to identify, arrest, torture and kill the political opponents and protesting women.
The manner of inspection and behavior of the Taliban forces with the people is accompanied by violence, humiliation and beyond the law that by finding the smallest document and suspicion, a citizen is detained, tortured and forced to confess. This torture is so violent that in some cases the accused person has lost his/her life under the torture.
Andreas von Brandt, the European Union ambassador for Afghanistan, called this house-to-house operation a crime. On October 8, Mr. Brandt wrote on his Twitter page that intimidation, house-to-house searches, arrests and violence against members of different ethnic groups and women are crimes and must be stopped immediately.
According to Afghanistan International TV, “the Taliban threatened the people not to take pictures and videos of the house-to-house inspection so that they are not published in the media.” Taliban have neither legitimacy inside Afghanistan nor outside, they consider Afghan citizens as their enemy and fear them.
Due to the brutal suppression of the women's protest movement by the Taliban, the majority of protesting women were forced to go into hiding and changed the form of their struggles. Protesting women in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban have no safe place and there is a risk of being identified and arrested at any moment. The house-to-house operation by the Taliban has caused serious concern for the Spontaneous Movement of Afghan Women (SMAW) and there is a possibility that the activists, members and supporters of this movement will be identified and arrested.
The SMAW calls on activists and organizations defending human rights and women's rights to protest against these repressive measures of the Taliban. SMAW requests the member states of the European Union to act urgently to save the women under threat from detention, torture and execution, and to grant them asylum according to the decision of the Supreme Court of the European Union. “On October 4, 2024, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that gender and nationality alone are sufficient for a country to grant asylum to Afghan women.”
