In the village where I grew up, girls were not able to go to school for many years because of the restrictions and obstacles imposed by the Taliban. That is why I felt I needed to do something about this. I worked hard to start up a few classrooms by on personal expense, and collected old school books from my friends and relatives and sent them to the village. I was also paying teachers’ salaries. Moreover, for years I have also been a critic of the policies and behavior of the government and the Taliban. After the Taliban regained power and blocked schools for women and girls, I protested against it on my Facebook page.
After publishing a Facebook post, a friend of mine told me that he had heard from a reputable authority that the Taliban are planning to arrest and imprison me. I escaped from the city to the village, and there, armed Taliban men came from the district center to arrest me, I hid and fled back to the city. After a while I thought the Taliban had forget about the issue and the problem was solved. In early April of 2022, when I was in my private school, the armed Taliban attacked the school and detained me. During the detention, in addition to the beatings and physical torture, they humiliated and insulted me. I was then transferred to a detention center of the Directorate of Intelligence. The Taliban accused me of committing “venomous propaganda” by order of foreigners against the Taliban leader’s decrees and the Islamic Emirate. They said I should be punished and penalized for what I did.
They forced me to lay on the ground and was cruelly torturing me with sticks and power cables. I was kneeling in pain and was fainting, they were coming again and beating and torturing me until fainting. They were laughing loudly and was saying this is the punishment of propaganda against the Islamic Emirate. I was begging but they were not giving me a chance to speak. I was locked in a dark room for 10 days during which time I was severely tortured.
Finally, after 10 days, they released me after I provided a written guarantee that I will no longer criticize the Taliban and the Islamic Emirate on Facebook and that I will not tell anyone about what happened to me in the prison.
