For Sadaf Coco, a transgender woman, the news of the Taliban’s return was a panic alarm. The life she had built in Kabul disappeared overnight when she heard on August 15, 2021, that the group’s fighters were at the city gates. So, she and her boyfriend grabbed their little savings, rented a vehicle, and drove to an unknown destination. “I knew what awaited us if we had to stay: detention, torture, or death at the hands of the Taliban,” she said.
But life for 22-year-old Sadaf was challenging even before the Taliban neared Kabul. At birth, she was registered as a boy, named Sayed Ashraf. When she reached puberty, her body began betraying her in new ways. She felt more and more different as time passed. “Physically, I was not growing like a normal boy and my thoughts and behavior were more like a girl,” she explained. “It also affected me emotionally and mentally. I preferred playing with girls and wearing their dresses.”
“It was God who revealed my gender in such a way, so it was not in my hands.”
—Sadaf Coco
The difficulties of life only grew as she came of age. Her parents refused to accept her when she opened up about how she felt. “I was humiliated, taken out of school, and constantly threatened,” she recalled. “My family was ready to harm me for their honor.”
Her neighbors and friends frequently insulted her and called her izak, a derogatory term used for trans and gay people in Afghanistan. “You are a shame who makes our neighborhood filthy,” Sadaf recalled one of her neighbors calling her.
Disowned by her family and left with no hope of identifying as a trans woman, Sadaf thought escape was the only way out. She left her family’s home and moved to Kabul.
At 19, she joined a transgender group in the burgeoning capital, beginning a new life of dancing at private functions or weddings. In a strict social environment where patriarchy and conservatism run deep, Sadaf said she had “found a new purpose in life and some sense of dignity.”
And then, the Taliban returned to power.
After days of hiding from the Taliban, Sadaf and her boyfriend managed to flee to Pakistan. But life in the northwestern city of Peshawar brought her less protection, not more. She was constantly harassed and threatened and her documents were scrutinized because they did not match her gender. “I was attacked by gangs and sexually assaulted,” she lamented. “On the one hand, I was abused due to my sexuality, and on the other for being a foreigner.”
The LGBT+ community has no future in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If their gender identity and/or sexual orientation is discovered, they can risk getting tortured to death.
—Nemat Sadat
Witnessing the extent of violence against the LGBT communities left behind in her home country and also their ill-treatment in Pakistan, Sadaf was emboldened to turn to activism. To mark the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover, Sadaf and a group of transgender activists staged a protest in Islamabad, accompanied by an online #LetUsLive campaign. Protestors called on Western countries to offer a resettlement pathway to the LGBT people from Afghanistan who are at risk of heightened violence and discrimination under the Taliban’s rule. The demonstration did drive attention, helping a number of LGBT individuals to safety, including Sadaf and her boyfriend, who finally arrived in Paris last month, where they have “started a new life with dignity and peace.”
One of the organizations that claims to have helped bring LGBT Afghans to safety is the US-based nonprofit Roshaniya. “To date, we have relocated 232 LGBT+ Afghans to Western countries,” Nemat Sadat, director of Roshaniya said, adding that the organization is helping over 2000 people to seek asylum in the West.
More than two years on, the Taliban have engaged in widespread violation of human rights in the country, including systematic discrimination against women and girls which experts say account for gender apartheid. However, activists like Mr. Sadat say that LGBT people are at grave risk of violence and persecution because of their distinct gender identity or sexual expression in the absence of legal protections.
“The LGBT+ community has no future in Afghanistan under the Taliban,” said Mr. Sadat, whose debut novel The Carpet Weaver chronicles the story of a gay man’s relationship with sexuality and identity in Afghanistan. “They have no source of livelihood and they have no right to exist under sharia law. If their gender identity and/or sexual orientation is discovered, they can risk getting tortured to death.”
Although sources are scarce to show the breadth of rights abuses of LGBT people under the Taliban rule, Mr. Sadat says Roshaniya has documented over 820 cases of arrest, detention, sexual assault, and/or torture of LGBT Afghans. These cases include the murder of seven members of the community and at least three more who have been missing since August 2021. Other rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW), which constantly monitors human rights situations in Afghanistan, say they have heard dozens of similar accounts of abuses. HRW’s detailed report in 2022 indicated that the Taliban control has “added a new layer of danger” to the already precarious situation of LGBT people facing threats and harassment from family members, neighbors, police, online contacts, and even romantic partners.
While some LGBT individuals interviewed by HRW said that members of their families reported on them in a bid to settle old scores or to win their own protection from Taliban violence, others described how former romantic partners joined the Taliban and sent messages to their previous partners promising to hunt them down. “Taliban fighters assaulted people at checkpoints for wearing clothes that did not conform to accepted gender norms—or even outfits deemed too “Western”—and searched their cellphones and belongings for evidence that they were LGBT.” A male couple, whose location was withheld, told HRW that they escaped the city after several of their gay friends were killed, citing cases of targeted killings by the Taliban.
Massoud Nezami, a gay activist whose name we have changed to protect his identity, was arrested and tortured by the Taliban’s notorious intelligence agency last week. “I was stripped and paraded naked as my ordeal was filmed,” he recalled, holding back his tears. “I was subjected to waterboarding, electric shocks, and repeated beatings for several days.”
Now in hiding after being released following a forced confession to “never continue his un-Islamic tendencies”, Mr. Nezami says he has been deeply traumatized. “My pride and dignity are gone; I will never be the same. ”
The Taliban has made clear that their regime would not protect or respect the rights of the LGBT people in the country. A month after announcing their interim cabinet, one Taliban spokesperson told Reuters that human rights would be respected but within the framework of Islamic law, which would not include gay rights. “LGBT… That’s against our Sharia law,” he said. A Taliban judge had earlier said either stoning or execution could be the punishment for homosexuals.
Nemat Sadat, the activist and author, believes that the Taliban’s brutal violation of human rights, particularly against LGBT people, is deeply rooted in the Islamist group’s extremist and narrow ideology. “The ideology of the Taliban is antithetical to LGBT+ rights and asking the Islamic Emirate to provide protections for LGBT+ people will always be a nonstarter since homosexuality is not permitted under Sharia law, so are apostasy and sodomy,” he explained. “This is why LGBT+ people are perceived as the worst creatures in Islam—since our existence and identification makes us apostate and we engage in acts of sodomy and homosexual relations.”
Others like Basira Paigham, a 26-year-old LGBT-rights activist who was among the BBC’s 100 Women in 2021, view patriarchy and ignorance as other drivers of the mistreatment of LGBT in Afghanistan. “It is hard for people in the country, even for those highly educated, to accept people with different sexual orientations,” Basira, who presents herself as a queer, told KabulNow, “because rigid societal norms have explicitly defined gender to be a man or a woman.”
Coming out as queer was high-priced for Basira. “The rejection and denial was beyond anything I had imagined,” Basira, who fled to Ireland following the Taliban takeover, wailed. “Initially, my family, friends, and colleagues distanced or cut their relations with me after learning about my gender.” It was a price her family had to pay too. Her father was arrested and threatened by the Taliban authorities in Kabul and their home was searched several times.
I was profoundly shocked and depressed and, at one point, contemplated taking my own life.
—Basira Paigham
For lesbians and bisexual women, the Taliban’s mahram rules, which require a male chaperone to accompany them outside, means that mobility is curtailed even within the regime’s limitations. “They are terrified to venture outside their homes or safe houses if they have no family or are abandoned,” said Basira. “This could restrict them from getting a passport to flee the country when they could.”
Afghanistan was not a particularly kind place to LGBT people even before the Taliban’s takeover. However, in Basira’s words, the “brutal lengths the Taliban go to cannot be ignored.” During the past two decades and in the presence of the international community inside Afghanistan, same-sex was criminalized by law, rendering LGBT people voiceless and without any legal protection. Members of the LGBT community remained on the margins, deprived of their basic human rights and freedoms. The limitations often forced them into dancing, begging, or prostitution to make a living.
LGBT people are abused for who they are and who they love under Taliban rule.
—Massoud Nezami
A former lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan, which was closed down following the Taliban takeover, Mr. Sadat, a gay man himself, was among the first LGBT people in Afghanistan to openly announce his sexuality. But, the responses were quick and sharp. He was fired from his teaching post at the American University while he was away in New York and told not to return to the country because his “promotion of homosexuality was allegedly subverting Islam.” Infuriated, he took his message to Facebook and wrote: “For the last few people on the planet who don’t know, let me tell you now: Yes, I’m proud to be gay, Afghan, American, and Muslim. So get over it!”
Under the current regime, Mr. Sadat says the situation has dramatically exacerbated and impunity is widespread. “For the short-term, we need to evacuate all the remaining at-risk LGBT+ Afghans who remain stuck in Afghanistan,” he said. “For the long-term, we need to ensure that they are represented in all conferences that Afghans from the opposition and the Taliban meet to discuss the future of the country.”
“There can never be peace and stability in Afghanistan until homosexuality is legalized in Afghanistan and LGBT+ people have the same rights as every Afghan citizen,” he asserted.
In the words of Mr. Nezami, the activist in hiding, LGBT people are abused for who they are and who they love under Taliban rule.
