FAIZABAD, Afghanistan – The Taliban prison is a ruined house, a cave, a dirty basement in an abandoned house or a village mosque. Hit or worse is a certainty, and the sentence is indefinite. Food, if any, is stale bread and cold beans. A bed is the floor or a dirty carpet. The death threat – shouted, shouted, sometimes inflicted – is always present.
Malik Mohammadi, a quiet 60-year-old farmer, saw the Taliban kill his 32-year-old son Nasrullah, an army officer, in one of the prisons. Over a period of nine days last year, Nasrullah, an epileptic, was denied medicine by his captains. He was denied food. His father sees blood coming out of his mouth and bruises due to beatings. On the 10th day he dies.
“The Taliban beat him,” he said. Mohammadi said quietly. “I killed my son’s dead.”
Such repression is part of the Taliban’s strategy to control the territories under their rule. While the Afghan government and Taliban negotiators in Qatar are appropriately talking about meetings for talks, although the idea of true peace is waning, the reality is that the insurgents already own a large part of the country. An impending U.S. withdrawal, coupled with a weak Afghan security force barely able to defend itself, means the group is likely to maintain this authority and its cruel ways of submitting submissions.
One of the Taliban’s most terrifying tools to do so is a loose network of prisons, an impromptu archipelago of abuse and suffering, in which the insurgents pronounce a harsh sentence on their fellow Afghans, arbitrarily stopping them on the highway. They are mostly looking for soldiers and government workers. The government is also accused of ill-treatment in its prisons, while the United Nations recently found that nearly a third of the prisoners of the Afghan army had been tortured.
In the case of the Taliban, the detainees are locked up in hidden temporary prisons, a universe of prisons in which the unfortunate charges, day after day, are moved from ruined house to isolated mosque, and back again – without any sense of how long their detention will last. The approach is anything but discriminatory.
“It still comes back to me in my sleep,” said Sayed Hiatullah, a 42-year-old shopkeeper in Faizabad. Last year, Mr. Hiatullah falsely accused at a Taliban checkpoint that he was campaigning for state security. He was detained for 25 days.
“I wake up and scream,” he said. It was the darkest, bitterest period of my life. I was in shock for six months, “said Mr. Hiatullah said.
“I relive my memories one hundred percent, every second, every minute,” said Atiqullah Hassanzada, 31, a former soldier who was captured last year on his way to a military hospital in Kabul and spoken on the floor of his home. has. “I was hit in the back of my thighs and on my shoulder,” he said.
Faizabad, a city in the far north of Afghanistan and the capital of Badakhshan province, is inhabited by numerous former Taliban prisoners, as the insurgents control many of the roads from here to the capital Kabul. The journey undertaken means exposure to the Taliban checkpoints and capture.
In Faizabad, the Taliban’s technique is to first capture and punish and later ask questions. There is no judge and no court. Local villagers are forced to provide food. Although thousands of Afghans have been detained in this way, there are no statistics. Afghan special forces said they had recently released more than 40 detainees from a Taliban prison in Baghlan province, which is not uncommon in local news broadcasts. On Monday, 23 more were released in Kunduz province after being ‘extensively tortured’ by the Taliban, the Afghan Ministry of Defense said.
The effect of this arbitrary imprisonment has a reign of terror. “I begged them to let me go,” he said. Hiatullah said. “They will beat me even more.”
“The Taliban stopped the vehicle and arrested me,” Naqibullah Momand said, traveling to his home in Kunduz province last year. “They put their hand on my heart to check my heart rate,” the 26-year-old television presenter said.
For the Taliban, a rapid rhythm would have shown guilt; Mr. Momand forced himself to stay calm, but he still spent 29 days in a two-room house with 20 others and slept on a dirty carpet on the floor, a single light bulb that was lit all night, before his prisoners conceded was not a member of the Afghan army.
Catching is just the beginning of the torment. Local commanders, often very young, have unimpeded control over their prisoners.
“The behavior of the Taliban members at a low level is very bad,” said Fazul-Ahmad Aamaj, an elderly, semi-official mediator in Faizabad, the most famous of about 15 in Badakhshan. People whose family members have been captured regularly turn to Mr. Aamaj for help. He secured the release of dozens of prisoners from the group through negotiations over family, tribal elders and money.
Rahmatullah Danishjo, a university student captured on the way to Kabul, on his way from Wardak province in September 2019, was tied up and taken to a village mosque. As with other prisoners, the holy place has hardly become a sanctuary.
For local commanders, the mosque is an ideal prison. ‘This is the one central place in town; in many of the towns, the mosque is synonymous with the Taliban, ”said Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Center for the Study of Armed Groups, which has thoroughly studied Taliban justice. “That’s the way they enforce behavior.”
The Taliban also operates a parallel network of civil courts in which religious scholars judge land disputes and family disputes. These courts, with their swift rulings, have gained a reputation for being efficient and are welcomed by many Afghans, especially compared to the corrupt legal system of government. Taliban courts also adjudicate murders and moral and religious offenses. Here the emphasis is on ‘punishment’; the system “relies on beatings and other forms of torture,” Human Rights Watch said in a report last year.
Crimes that are considered political, such as working for or fighting for the Afghan government, live in a different universe. There are no courts for such crimes. Human Rights Watch gives local Taliban leaders absolute authority “to arrest anyone they consider suspicious.”
Mohammed Aman, 31, a government engineer, said he was pulled over, handcuffed, handcuffed and taken to a mosque one afternoon on the Ghazni highway to Kabul last November. “There were ten or 11 others, handcuffed to a chain inside the mosque,” he said. We prayed early in the morning. They came, and they beat us, ‘said Mr. Danishjo, who was detained in another mosque, said.
“They beat us with sticks for maybe five minutes. “They hit us in the back,” he said. “They beat us.”
“One of the Taliban beat us in the courtyard of the mosque,” said Abdel Qadir Sharifi, 25, who was captured when his military base was raided. “I believed they would kill me.”
Death is the ever-present threat, which is sometimes inflicted but more often used as a terrifying negotiation to obtain what the Taliban wants: money, an exchange of prisoners or a painfully worked out promise to give up government service. The deliberate, often slow, killing of prisoners also takes place.
Mohammadi, along with the elders of the village to negotiate his son’s release in exchange for the Taliban prisoners, was able to see his son three times during Nasrullah’s captivity.
“They tried to get him upright. But he kept falling down, ‘recalls Mr. Mohammadi. The Taliban shouted at him, “Do you see what is happening to your son?” ”
The next day, the Taliban moved Nasrullah to a ruined house. By the ninth day, he had lost consciousness. He was dirty, covered with urine and feces.
His hijackers killed Mr. Mohammadi allowed himself to be washed in cold water. But it was too late. “He was dying,” his father said. “The last time I saw him was in the garden of the ruined house,” he said.
After the death of his son, the Taliban tormented him. “Why don’t you cry?” they ask. “I told them I did not want to cry in front of the trees and the rocks,” he said. Mohammadi said.
“I cried alone,” he said.
His other son, Rohullah Hamid, 35, a lawyer in Kabul who took part in the failed attempt to free his brother, said: “Every day dozens of Afghans die because of the Taliban. The Taliban is the enemy of mankind. ”
Najim Rahim reported on Faizabad, Taimoor Shah Taimoor Shah of Kandahar and Farooq Jan Mangal of Khost.