Hundreds of Afghan Men Risked Their Lives to Protest the Taliban’s Treatment of Women
Afghan women have been speaking out against the Taliban for years. After dozens were brutally detained, men in one city finally joined them.
Akram can’t remember exactly when he decided to join the protests that erupted in the streets of Herat last month. He had been angry for months, years even, at the way the Taliban had treated women and minorities in Afghanistan since they returned to power half a decade ago.
The anger started when the Taliban banned girls from attending schools and universities — a move that was particularly unpopular in Herat, a bastion of education and culture and the most socially liberal of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
It grew when they decreed that women must be excluded from most paid employment and could only go out if accompanied by a male relative.
But it was when Taliban thugs began snatching women off the streets in June and detaining them on accusations of violating the group’s draconian dress rules that he felt he could no longer remain silent. Along with hundreds of other men and a smaller number of women — for whom the risks of resistance are even greater — Akram took to the streets in an act of resistance that could have cost him his life.
“There’s only so much oppression one can tolerate,” Akram told The Persistent on a call from Herat city, the capital of the province of the same name, where he has lived his whole life.
“The people of Herat will tolerate some of their demands, but we will not compromise when it comes to our honor. We will resist, even if it leads to suppression,” said Akram, whose real name we are withholding for fear of reprisals.
Public dissent is rare in Afghanistan, where the Taliban rule by intimidation and fear, and the June 9 protests in Herat were brutally suppressed. Members of the Islamist group’s feared morality police fired shots into the crowd, killing a child and injuring others. Countless protesters were beaten or detained.
But while the street protests may have been swiftly crushed, their significance endures. For the first time, Afghan men came out in large numbers in support of Afghan women, who have been systematically erased from public life under the Taliban, unable to work, study, or even be seen in public.
Akram recalls “There were over 400 of us, and many men had gathered and were chanting slogans of freedom. Everyone was shouting ‘Azadi [freedom]! Azadi!’ We felt strong in numbers,” he said as he described the scene from the demonstrations. Protesters also mobilized in Jibrail, a district in Herat province largely populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, who have historically been persecuted by the Taliban.
Claire Cozens
Why now?
The reaction can be partly explained by the scale of the crackdown on women. The United Nations office in Afghanistan counted 30 cases of women who were detained for allegedly not wearing the full face covering now mandatory for women, but some activists have claimed hundreds of women were detained over a period of two days.
Many were, in fact, fully covered — videos circulating on social media showed members of the Taliban bundling women dressed in long black abayas into large white vans. Women in Herat in the east of the country tend to favor the abaya, or robe, over the burqa worn by many women in the Taliban heartlands of southern Afghanistan, which has a grille covering the face.
The detentions were “humiliating,” said Mariam, one of the few remaining female medics working at a senior level in Afghanistan. “They were taking the women to unknown locations, or maybe transferring them to Herat Prison,” she told me on a phone call in early June, anger clear in her voice.
Mariam, whose name we have changed for her protection, said one of her own colleagues was among those detained. She believes the alleged dress code violations were just an excuse to intimidate women and extort money from their families. Relatives were asked to pay money to secure the release of detained loved ones, she says, accusing the Taliban of treating women like the rickshaws that they confiscated from drivers in a crackdown on unregistered vehicles earlier in the year.
Claire Cozens
How the Taliban criminalized support for women
Why did it take something so extreme to mobilize support for women among Afghan men?
The answer lies partly in the threats and intimidation tactics the Taliban has used to try to weaponize existing patriarchal norms.
“The penalty for supporting women can be very high in Afghanistan,” explained Shaharzad Akbar, the executive director of Rawadari, an organization set up to document the Taliban’s human rights violations.
“We have documented cases of arbitrary detention, disappearances, extrajudicial killings of men who are opposed to the Taliban or have dared to criticise the Taliban on their policies, including on women’s right to education,” she said.
Initially there was also the belief that men would be treated more harshly than women if they stepped out of line, says Akbar, though in fact the Taliban have proved more than willing to physically abuse women, too.
“We have documented instances of arbitrary detention of women protesters, physical beating of women on the streets, and also serious allegations of sexual abuse and rape that go against all the cultural and Islamic norms that the Taliban claim to believe in,” says Akbar, who chaired the Afghan Human Rights Commission before fleeing Kabul when the Taliban took power in 2021. She now lives in the U.K.
In addition, she points out, men have been forced into the role of gatekeepers of their female relatives, a system that appears almost designed to create division. If a woman is caught deviating from the Taliban’s rules, their brothers, their fathers, or their husbands are called in and made to provide guarantees that they will prevent them from repeating the offence.
“They have built the laws in a way that penalize the men who may appear to support women’s access to rights,” Akbar says.
“Such provisions embolden oppressive men, and encourage restrictive attitudes among them, while discouraging men who want to stand against the Taliban’s policies.”
Although they face even greater barriers, women continue to resist simply because they have lost more, Akbar says. They have devised unique forms of dissent, such as painting graffiti messages on walls and organising secret indoor protests, videos of which are later circulated online.
“The reality of the Taliban is much closer to their skin. And so they are much more determined to fight it,” Akbar says.
In Herat, the protests have stopped — for now — and Akram is confident they won’t be the last.
“People understand that the government is growing weaker,” he says. “It is being destroyed and weakened, internally and from the outside. This is just the beginning of the work.”
Claire Cozens
