‘My whole body was praying for my death’: LGBTQ Afghans say they face abuse in detention as Taliban crackdown intensifies

(CNN) — It was the early hours of the morning when a guard entered Sohrab’s cell – a small, dark room with a barred window and a blanket on the floor – in Kabul’s sprawling Pul-e-Charkhi prison last August.

The 19-year-old was escorted to another room in the complex, where he heard a Taliban member order the prison guards to leave and stop anyone else from entering. Panic set in, for Sohrab knew what these words often preceded. He had experienced physical violence at the hands of the Taliban before.

“He grabbed me from behind, tore my clothes apart and raped me,” Sohrab – whose name has been changed for security reasons – told CNN in October. “For several days after that I had severe pain and bleeding.”

Sohrab was being detained at Pul-e-Charkhi on the charge of sodomy, after family members found out about his and his boyfriend’s clandestine romance last year, he said. News of their relationship had spread through their tight-knit community, leading to his arrest and forced confession.

Sohrab spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, following his release from prison after two months. On his release, Sohrab said the Taliban warned that if he was arrested again, he would face execution.

Human rights monitors have told CNN that since 2021, when the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, LGBTQ citizens have faced widespread sexual and physical violence in detention amid a systematic clampdown on minority groups. CNN has spoken to five LGBTQ Afghans who say they experienced physical abuse during time in detention, including – for some – repeated rape, electrocution, strangulation and flogging with metal chains. Transgender and gender non-conforming people are being “consistently” targeted at Taliban checkpoints due to their choice of clothing, human rights groups said.

In response to CNN’s findings, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “acts such as sodomy, bestiality and other perversions that contravene Islamic law are illegal and perpetrators dealt with within the legal framework.”

They added: “These allegations are fabrications as the alleged claims of torture, rape, persecution and mistreatment are themselves explicit violations of the legal framework.”

CNN was able to locate the former detainees through two human rights charities: Roshaniya, a nonprofit organization working to relocate persecuted LGBTQ Afghans to safe countries, and Afghan LGBT Organization, a Czech Republic-based advocacy group established in 2021 to monitor human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

A week after the first assault, his wounds still raw, Sohrab said he was raped again – and then a further four times by the same Taliban member.

“My whole body was praying for my death,” Sohrab said. “Every time, he would threaten me that if I dared to tell anyone about the rape, he would kill me with his own hands.” Sohrab managed to leave Afghanistan, but lives in constant fear of further persecution, for the country he fled to also criminalizes homosexuality.

Since 2021, Roshaniya has been in touch with around 2,000 LGBTQ Afghans in the country. It said that it has documented 825 instances of violence against LGBTQ people in Afghanistan in this time, including beatings, arrests and detention, but added that this was likely a “severe undercount.” CNN cannot independently verify these figures. Those detained in prison are almost always subject to torture, the organization said.

The nonprofit added that it has relocated 252 LGBTQ Afghans to safe countries since 2021.

Neela Ghoshal, senior director of law and policy at US-based charity Outright International, said that there could be a “number of reasons” why the Taliban is using sexual violence as a tool of repression against the LGBTQ community.

“We know that so-called ‘corrective rape’ – which I think of as not corrective at all, but as bias-motivated rape that is often done to punish people – happens all over the world,” she said, and is more about power than sexuality.

In the context of Afghanistan, she said, some of the same Taliban members who are calling for LGBTQ people to be punished for same-sex relationships are also engaging in non-consensual and violent sexual abuse of men and boys.

When the Taliban completed their lightning takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 – following the messy withdrawal of US-led troops after two decades of conflict – it wasn’t clear how severely they would enforce their strict interpretation of religious laws against Afghanistan’s LGBTQ community.

Under the previous Western-backed government, same-sex sexual relations were already punishable by up to two years in jail, with LGBTQ people also facing harassment and violence from society and the police, according to the US Department of State.

During the Taliban’s resurgence, one Taliban judge said there were only two punishments for homosexuality – stoning or being crushed under a wall, according to Germany’s Bild newspaper; others said the Islamist group had tempered its more radical attitudes.

“I remember many people, many politicians, claiming that the Taliban had changed, that they would not practice those brutal punishments that they used to do,” Artemis Akbary, director of Afghan LGBT Organization, told CNN. “But now, after three years, I can see that, for example, the Taliban uses sexual violence as a weapon to oppress the LGBTQI community.”

Afghan LGBT Organization has verified more than 50 cases of detention of LGBTQ people since August 2021, using documentation issued by the Taliban, such as letters and arrest warrants, and is working to verify a further 150 cases reported by individuals.

‘Afghanistan itself is a prison for us’

It’s hard to estimate how many LGBTQ people have been detained in Afghanistan overall since 2021, Ghoshal said, thanks to a lack of reporting channels and a fear of reprisal for speaking out.

But the Taliban certainly appear to have become more systematic in their persecution of LGBTQ people since regaining power, Ghoshal said. Some people have reported that officials are actively “hunting for them, coming to their houses, with arrest warrants issued,” she said.

“I will never forget when the Taliban came to our house,” Samiar Nazari, a 22-year-old transgender man, told CNN. “Some villagers had informed the Taliban that there was a girl who wore men’s clothes.”

Nazari, who fled before later being beaten and briefly detained by the Taliban, is now in a safe country but says living under Taliban rule is “forever etched in my mind, memories of fear, helplessness, and loss of hope.”

Others have been detained over content found on their phones or posted on social media, suggesting the Taliban could be using the internet to track down members of the LGBTQ community, Akbary said.

“One night I was in a taxi to come home, (and) the Taliban stopped me and the taxi driver for a search,” said Abdul, a 22-year-old gay man. “They saw my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. All the photos and content were LGBTQ,” he said.

Abdul had managed to flee to Iran following the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, and then to Turkey, but he was deported back to Afghanistan in early 2024, he said.

Speaking with CNN in October, Abdul recalled how he was taken to a “dark room” where he suffered “torture and beatings” multiple times a day. “Every night a big guy used to come to beat me up. Several times he choked me,” Abdul said. “Many times, I thought I was going to die.”

After two weeks held in this room, Abdul was transferred to a prison in Herat, northwestern Afghanistan, for a further six months, only being released when a friend paid the Taliban the equivalent of $1,200 to bail him out, he said.

His family refused to have him back due to his sexuality being exposed, he said, and he now lives in hiding again, with no support from friends or relatives. “I am still in the Taliban jail, but the only difference is that I am not inside a prison.”

‘Many LGBTs were there in the rooms’

Tracking the alleged abuse of LGBTQ detainees is a difficult task in a country stalked by fear of the Taliban and with heavy restrictions on media freedom.

Much of it reportedly takes place behind closed doors in formal and informal detention facilities, said David Osborn, director of Afghan Witness, a human rights monitoring project run by the UK’s Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), which specializes in open-source analysis.

In these facilities, the only source of footage is likely to be that filmed by the perpetrators themselves, Osborn told CNN, but in Afghanistan this rarely surfaces. “This has created a black box for human rights, where the lack of visibility means LGBTQ individuals are at even greater risk,” he said.

However, the Afghan Witness team has been able to draw on the Taliban’s official website and X account, which frequently publish details of punishments handed down, to document 43 public floggings since November 2022 where “sodomy” was listed on the charge sheet. CNN cannot independently verify these figures.

These flogging events involved 360 people, including 192 men, 40 women and 128 of unknown sex or gender, according to Afghan Witness data.

But the exact number of those flogged for the charge of sodomy alone is unclear, as other offenses, such as adultery and having an “illicit relationship,” are often also listed, the organization said. It’s also hard to know how many of these charges are leveled specifically against members of the LGBTQ community.

Other human rights groups have documented instances of extrajudicial detention, conducted out of the public eye. In some of Afghanistan’s provinces, this is signaled by a lack of the official documents usually issued in relation to someone’s arrest or court case, Akbary said.

Sano – not his real name – told CNN he was detained for 15 days last year in a large house used by Taliban members on the outskirts of Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. His father was forced into handing him over to the group for supposed questioning about his sexuality, after which the Taliban said he would be released.

Instead, Sano says, his phone memory card was taken, and he was locked in a windowless room for two weeks. “I was tortured so much by the Taliban. Slapped. Beaten by them,” the 24-year-old said in September. “The room was in darkness. I couldn’t feel the sun.”

Sano claims the house was being used to detain other LGBTQ Afghans too. “There were many LGBTs brought to the house before me,” he said. “Some of them were killed. One of my partners was killed by them. Many LGBTs were there in the rooms.”

He was only released from detention when the Taliban were paid a fee, he said, facilitated by someone known by his father. He’s now in hiding after discovering that the Taliban are trying to track him down again.

Women and LGBTQ Afghans ‘united in their suffering’

In February, Afghan LGBT Organization and Outright International wrote a joint letter to Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN’s under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, highlighting a “lack of inclusion of LGBTIQ perspectives in UN engagement on Afghanistan.”

Top UN officials and global envoys met with the Taliban in Qatar in June to discuss human rights concerns. But the talks sparked a backlash from human rights organizations for excluding Afghan women and other civil society groups.

After the meeting, DiCarlo told a press conference that the “concerns and views of Afghan women and civil society were front and center, adding that those present “also discussed the need for more inclusive governance and respect for the rights of minorities.”

Examples of the Taliban’s curtailment of human rights in the country were documented in a September report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). But the report made no mention of LGBTQ people, including bisexual, lesbian and transgender men and women, Akbary said. “In general, the UN is ignoring the situation of LGBTQ people in Afghanistan,” he added.

UNAMA told CNN it is “extremely difficult” to gather substantial information about the treatment of LGBTQ people in Afghanistan due to extreme social stigma and limited civil society organizations representing LGBTQ people in the country.

With little sign that the Taliban will improve their record on human rights, many in the country feel abandoned by the international community.

Afghan women and LGBTQ people are united in their suffering, Abdul said.

“I am a prisoner in a country called Afghanistan,” he said. “I have to hide from everyone, hide from family, hide from friends, hide from the government, hide from life.”

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