FAIZABAD, Afghanistan – The Taliban prison is a dilapidated house, a cave, a dirty basement in an abandoned house or a village mosque. Beatings or worse are a certainty and the sentence is undefined. Food, if any, is stale bread and cold beans. A bed is the dirty floor or carpet. The threat of death – screamed, shouted, sometimes inflicted – is always present.
Malik Mohammadi, a calm 60-year-old farmer, saw the Taliban kill his 32-year-old son Nasrullah, an army officer, in one of these prisons. Over a nine-day period last year, Nasrullah, an epileptic, was turned down by his captors. He was denied food. His father saw blood coming out of his mouth and bruises from being beaten. On the tenth day, he died.
“The Taliban defeated him,” said Mohammadi in a low voice. “I watched my son die.”
This repression is part of the Taliban’s strategy to control the territories under its government. As the Afghan government and Taliban negotiators in Qatar talk sporadically about a negotiating meeting, even when the idea of real peace has subsided, the reality is that insurgents already control much of the country. The approach of a withdrawal from the United States, along with a weak Afghan security force, barely able to defend itself, means that the group is likely to retain that authority and its brutal ways of invoking submission.
One of the Taliban’s most fearful tools for doing this is a loose network of prisons, an improvised archipelago of ill-treatment and suffering, in which insurgents inflict severe summary judgment on their Afghan comrades, arbitrarily stopping them on the highway. Mostly, they seek soldiers and civil servants. The government has also been accused of mistreatment in its prisons, with the United Nations recently discovering that almost a third of Afghan army prisoners have been tortured.
In the case of the Taliban, detainees are locked up in hidden improvised prisons, a universe of incarceration in which the unfortunate accused are often transferred, day after day, from a ruined house to an isolated mosque, and back – without any notion. how long your detention will last. The approach is anything but discriminatory.
“It keeps coming back to me in my sleep,” said Sayed Hiatullah, a 42-year-old shopkeeper in Faizabad. Last year, Hiatullah was falsely accused at a Taliban checkpoint of working for state security. He was jailed for 25 days.
“I wake up and scream,” he said. “It was the darkest and most bitter period of my life. I was in shock for six months, ”said Hiatullah.
“I relive my memories 100 percent, every second, every minute,” said Atiqullah Hassanzada, 31, a former soldier captured last year on his way to a military hospital in Kabul, speaking on the floor of his home. “I was beaten on the back of my thighs and on the shoulder,” he said.
Faizabad, a city in the far north of Afghanistan and capital of Badakhshan province, is inhabited by several former Taliban prisoners, as insurgents control many of the roads from here to the capital, Kabul. Making this journey means exposure to Taliban checkpoints and capture.
In Faizabad, the Taliban’s technique is to incarcerate and punish first and ask questions later. There is no judge or court. Local residents are forced to provide food. Although thousands of Afghans have been detained in this way, there are no statistics. Afghan special forces said they recently released more than 40 detainees from a Taliban prison in Baghlan province, a common incident on local news. On Monday, 23 more people were released in Kunduz province after being “widely tortured” by the Taliban, the Afghan Defense Ministry said.
The effect of these arbitrary arrests is one of terror. “I cried to them, crying, to release me,” said Hiatullah. “They would hit me even more.”
“The Taliban stopped the vehicle and arrested me,” said Naqibullah Momand, who was traveling to his home in Kunduz province last year. “They put their hand on my heart to check my heartbeat,” said the 26-year-old television host.
For the Taliban, a quick hit would indicate guilt; Mr. Momand forced himself to remain calm, but still ended up spending 29 days locked in a two-room house with 20 other people, sleeping on a dirty rug on the floor, a single lamp lit all night, before his captors he was not a member of the Afghan army.
The capture is only the beginning of the torment. Local commanders, often very young, have unrestricted control over their prisoners.
“The behavior of low-ranking Taliban members is very bad,” said Fazul-Ahmad Aamaj, an elderly semi-official mediator in Faizabad, the best known of the 15 or so in Badakhshan. People whose relatives have been captured often ask Mr. Aamaj for help. He secured the release of dozens of the group’s prisoners, through negotiations involving family, tribal elders and money.
Rahmatullah Danishjo, a university student captured on the road to Kabul on the way to Wardak province in September 2019, was tied up and taken to a village mosque. As with other prisoners, the holy place has hardly proved to be a sanctuary.
For local commanders, the mosque is an ideal prison. “It is the only central place in the village; in many of the villages, the mosque is synonymous with Taliban, ”said Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Center for the Study of Armed Groups, which has extensively studied Taliban justice. “It’s the way they enforce behavior.”
The Taliban also operate a parallel network of civilian courts in which religious scholars judge land disputes and family fights. These courts, with their speedy trials, have earned a kind of reputation for efficiency and are well received by many Afghans, especially compared to the government’s corrupt justice system. Taliban courts also try murders and alleged moral and religious offenses. Here, the emphasis is on “punishment”; the system “depends on beatings and other forms of torture,” Human Rights Watch said in a report last year.
Political crimes, such as working for the Afghan government or fighting for it, inhabit a different universe. There are no courts for these crimes. Local Taliban commanders have absolute authority “to arrest anyone they deem suspicious,” Human Rights Watch said.
Mohammed Aman, 31, a government engineer, said he was stopped on the Ghazni to Kabul highway one November afternoon, handcuffed and taken to a mosque. “There were 10 or 11 others, handcuffed to a chain, inside the mosque,” he said. “We were praying, early in the morning. They came and beat us, ”said Danishjo, who was being held in another mosque.
“They beat us with sticks for about five minutes. They hit us in the back, ”he said. “They were hitting us on the hands.”
“One of the Taliban flogged us in the courtyard of the mosque,” said Abdel Qadir Sharifi, 25, who was captured when his military base was invaded. “I believed they were going to kill me.”
Death is the ever-present threat, sometimes inflicted, but more often used as a formidable bargaining chip to earn what the Taliban wants: money, a prisoner exchange or a painfully extracted promise to resign from government service. The deliberate, often slow, death of captives also occurs.
Summoned along with the village elders to negotiate the release of his son in exchange for Taliban prisoners, Mohammadi was able to see his son three times during Nasrullah’s brief captivity.
“They tried to sit you down. But it continued to fall, ”recalls Mohammadi. The Taliban shouted at him: “‘Do you see what is happening to your son?’ ”
The following day, the Taliban transferred Nasrullah to a ruined house. On the ninth day, he had lost consciousness. He was dirty, covered in urine and excrement.
His captors allowed Mohammadi to wash him in cold water. But it was too late. “He was dying,” said his father. “The last time I saw him was in the backyard of the destroyed house,” he said.
After the death of his son, the Taliban tormented him. “Why don’t you cry?” they asked. “I told them, I don’t want to cry in front of trees and rocks,” said Mohammadi.
“I cried alone,” he said.
Her other son, Rohullah Hamid, 35, a lawyer in Kabul, who participated in the failed effort to free his brother, said: “Every day, dozens of Afghans die because of the Taliban. The Taliban is the enemy of humanity. “
Najim Rahim contributed with a report from Faizabad, Taimoor Shah Taimoor Shah from Kandahar and Farooq Jan Mangal from Khost.