KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – A 28-year-old woman has been killed by her husband in Nangarhar province, eastern Afghanistan, as incidents of domestic violence continue to rise across the country.
Local sources told KabulNow that the incident occurred on Thursday in Goshta district, where a man who had forcibly married the woman hanged and killed her.
According to sources, the victim had been in her second marriage. Her first husband, the brother of her current husband, died a year ago. Following his death, she was forcibly married to her brother-in-law. She leaves behind two children from her first marriage.
The motive behind the killing remains unclear. Local Taliban authorities have confirmed the incident and said an investigation is underway.
Even before the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan had one of the highest rates of violence against women, with nine out of ten women experiencing at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime.
Since then, the situation has worsened significantly. Women have been systematically excluded from public life, and their fundamental rights have been stripped away through a series of restrictive policies.
Between January 2022 and June 2024, Afghan Witness, a project of the Center for Information Resilience, documented 700 incidents of violence targeting 840 women and girls. These cases included femicide, physical abuse, sexual assault, torture, enforced disappearances, and other violent acts against women and girls.
The Taliban has also dismantled the legal and institutional structures that previously offered protection for women, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to violence and without access to justice.
