After the Taliban seized control of Kabul in August of 2021, Tamana Rezaei took to the streets to demonstrate against rising gender apartheid in her country. As both a woman and a member of the Hazara minority, she faced double the danger, a story she recounts below.
My activism began in Jaghuri, Ghazni, where I was born. As a Hazara girl, I faced multifaceted discrimination and deprivation. Because there was no girls’ school in my village, I had to attend a boys’ high school. When my uncle tried to force me into marriage as an adolescent—a common tradition in my region—my mother, who herself had been a child bride, stopped it.
My mother’s resistance awakened my revolutionary spirit. The day that she prevented my forced marriage, I realized that if every woman took a stand, life would change for all women. When I was only a teenager, along with four girlfriends, I organized a group to speak to people in our village about forced marriage and its devastating consequences for women and children.
I had a measure of privilege because my father supported me, which is not always the case for girls in Afghanistan. He would lament, “I am very sorry that you were born with this talent and genius in a country like Afghanistan, where it is drowned in misogyny.” After high school, I moved from Ghazni to attend Kabul University’s law department.
As a Hazara, I have always been particularly aware of the oppression and discrimination we have continuously faced. In Kabul, my first civic action was to light candles in memory of the Hazaras who were executed or buried alive in Pul-e-Charkhi prison during the time of Nur Mohammad Taraki’s rule in 1978-79. In Dasht-e-Barchi, a Hazara neighborhood in Kabul that has been the site of many attacks and suicide bombings, my friends and I launched a campaign for girls’ education. Through these efforts, many families allowed their daughters to attend school.
Since then, I’ve participated in protests, from small university demonstrations to larger movements. In 2014, we protested the beheading of an eight-year-old Hazara girl by the Taliban in Zabul. We later organized protests against the beheading of eleven Hazara civilians by the Taliban on the Kabul highway in Bamyan. In 2015, I played a significant role in shaping the Enlightenment Movement, a youth movement formed to protest the inequities in development for Hazara communities. I later lost many friends in that movement after the suicide bombing of a peaceful protest in 2016 that killed at least eighty-five people and injured 413.
When I was young, I believed men held more power that women simply because of their gender. After becoming financially independent, I realized that power comes from working and receiving an income. “Whoever provides the bread, commands” is a saying that I now deeply understand. And this is exactly why the Taliban stopped women from working—to strip them of power and maintain the apartheid regime.
After university, I established my own law firm, where I prosecuted and imprisoned several Taliban soldiers and the organizers of suicide bombings. One case I pursued was the murder of my father in 2019 by the Taliban for building schools and educating girls in Jaghuri. The defendants were sentenced to thirty years in prison, but I received many threats from the Taliban and other groups for prosecuting such cases.
When provinces began to fall in the summer of 2021 and the Taliban released prisoners from the jails, I sought a safe haven for myself and my family and, upon advice from a neighbor who was a former soldier, burned all my documents except my university diploma. By September 2021, however, I joined the ranks of women protesters in the Hazara region west of Kabul. During our peaceful demonstrations, the Taliban beat and pepper sprayed us. When they blocked the streets, we continued our protests from home and found various ways to raise our voices, such as wearing men’s clothing, organizing theater performances, engaging in social and cultural activities, and painting on walls.
But despite our best efforts, the protesters were eventually arrested one by one. The day of my arrest was dark. It resembled a Hollywood movie scene in which military forces raid a terrorist group, except in this case, the Taliban’s target was merely a group of protesting women whose only weapons are their voices. The road was packed with military vehicles and Taliban soldiers, who pounded on the gates and forced them open by threatening to shoot us. They searched us roughly, took our phones, and interrogated us before sorting us into different groups and taking us to the Ministry of Interior. I was terrified.
The next day before sunrise, three Taliban fighters entered the room in which we were being held, mercilessly stepping on the children sleeping in front of the door. One of the fighters called my name, holding up my phone and asking, “Is this your mobile phone?” I denied it, but began to cry after seeing my father’s photo on the screen. He forced me to unlock it and began to go through my videos. After watching a video of us protesting, the fighters asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hijab and why I was shouting in the street. Then they opened my private photos.
Another Taliban member, whom the other fighters called Moin Sahib (Deputy Sir), asked me in Pashto, “Did you go to the protest yourself, or did someone encourage you?” Fearfully, I answered, “Myself.” He slapped me so hard that every time I saw him afterward, I felt like my heart was going to stop, and I trembled with fear. He began swearing at me. A Pashto-speaking female protester stepped between us and explained to the Taliban member that I didn’t understand Pashto and began translating for me. The Taliban member then opened another video that showed this same Pashto-speaking woman in it and took her away with him.
During my interrogation, the Taliban fighters told me that the death of Hazaras is permissible because they are “Rafizi,” a pejorative term they use for Shias, and all of us are absolute infidels. They said that killing us would open the doors of heaven for them. They also mentioned that if they weren’t under pressure from their higher-ups, they would have killed us right after we were arrested. In the days that followed, they would come late at night to take us to their interrogation rooms, where they would use violence to try to force us to reveal the whereabouts of the other protesting girls.
I soon began to contemplate suicide as a way out. But another one of the imprisoned protesting girls would try and press me to think of seeing my mother and my sister again, even if this prospect felt like a distant dream.
After twenty days imprisoned in Taliban jails, I was only released after heavy guarantees and a written commitment to cease activism. My mother later told me that she had fallen ill soon after my imprisonment and had gone to beg the Taliban to release me. This breaking of my mother’s pride was the hardest part of my detention and torture.
After my release from prison, I secretly left Afghanistan. It has taken and continues to take a long time to deal with what happened to me. Today, however, the lawsuits and the growing awareness among Afghanistan’s women about the Taliban’s gender apartheid are beginning to heal the wounds they inflicted on our souls and bodies. I believe that international recognition of the Taliban’s gender apartheid will eventually end its rule and open up pathways to bring its members to trial.
Tamana Rezaei, an activist and law graduate, was a barrister in Afghanistan until the Taliban took over.
This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. This article was edited from an interview with Rezaei by Mursal Sayas.
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Image: Rome, global day of action against gender apartheid, protest against the Taliban regime, in Piazza Esquilino. The demonstration organized by the Nawroz Association also aims to denounce the persecution of the Hazara people. Photo by Stefano Ronchini / ipa-agency.ne/IPA/Sipa USA.