“Please help me, the Taliban came to my house”: the women who disappear in Afghanistan after protesting against the regime

The Taliban can threaten with a whisper. After 20 years of violent fighting and the loss of tens of thousands of civilian lives, they seized power in Afghanistan using brute force.

Still, there are Afghan women who refuse to be intimidated.

Tamana Zaryabi Paryani is one of them. It takes pure courage to stand up to armed men who want to take almost everything you have achieved in life.

The third weekend of January joined dozens of women to demand the right to work and the right to education.

Taliban fighters sprayed protesters with pepper spray, and several said they had been knocked unconscious by electric shocks.

After making their voices heard, they returned home. Some women feared that they were being followed.

On Wednesday night at 8pm, armed men entered Tamana Paryani’s apartment block in the Parwan 2 neighborhood of Kabul.

She was at home with her sisters when the men started kicking the door.

“Please help me. The Taliban came to my house, my sisters are at home,” she pleaded. Paryani in a video posted on social media.

“We don’t want them here now,” he yelled. “Come back tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow,” he pleaded.

“You can’t see these girls at this time of night. Help me, the Taliban came to my house,” he exclaimed before the video ended.

“Prisoners in their homes”

Since the Taliban seized power on August 15, women have complained that they are now prisoners in their own homes.

And even there they are not safe. It is a violation of Afghan culture to enter a home where there are only women.

But after the female police officers were fired, the Taliban has no female staff available to question the women.

Tamana Paryani had been missing for two days when I went to her apartment to try and locate her.

There was no one inside the house. A large muddy boot print was still visible on the front door.

Neighbors told me that Paryani had been taken away along with two of her sisters and that no one had been in the apartment since.

They only said that “an armed group” he had taken the sisters.

Other women protesters were attacked that night. Another woman, Parawana Ibrahimkhel, is also missing. Still, the Taliban deny taking them.

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, Suhai Shaheen, who hopes to become the Taliban’s ambassador to the UN, said: “And [los talibanes] they would have been arrested, they would say that they have been arrested, and if that is the accusation, they will go to court and defend themselves“.

“This is something legal, but if they are not detained, they are staging fake scenes and making movies to seek asylum abroad.”

“Get out of your house. You are in danger”

One of Paryani’s friends told a different story.

From a safe place, in an interview with the BBC, he said: “I told him: ‘Get out of your house as soon as possible, take this more seriously, you are in danger'”.

“When I got home, a friend, also a protester, whose name I don’t want to mention, was crying because Tamana had been arrested by the Taliban and because she had posted a video on social media.”

It is not known if authorities are looking for the women.

Most of the world refuses to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.

More than half of the population is starving due to sanctions imposed by the West.

Under the authority of the Taliban, Afghanistan has become the only country in the world that publicly limits education based on gender, which is an important point of friction in the search for legitimacy of the group at the head of the government and in the lifting of sanctions.

That women regularly protest the issue is a source of embarrassment for the group.

Regardless of who owns Tamara Paryani, her sisters and her friends, the Taliban are collectively punishing Afghan women.

In the last 20 years, women here have abandoned cultural and family prejudices to live more freely.

These are decades of progress that the Taliban seem determined to destroy.

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