In recent weeks, the Taliban has conducted house-to-house searches and forcefully detained activists.
“They brought rubber whips to tie my hands, laid me on my stomach, and beat my buttocks till I bled,” says Bilal, a gay man from Afghanistan.
One evening in October 2021, Bilal was staying with a group of friends when armed Taliban members broke into the “safe house”. They forcefully detained him and another person in the middle of the night. The rest of the group managed to escape through the back door.
The Taliban locked them up in a bathroom and left them there until the next morning when the torture began.
They beat me up with power cables and threw cold water on me and passed electricity through it. These burns you are seeing, are because of this. I passed out of pain,” narrates Bilal.
Life before the fall of Kabul was already dangerous for gay men in Afghanistan under the Ashraf Ghani government, where same-sex relations were punishable with a prison sentence of up to two years.
In its investigation on threats faced by the community after the Taliban’s takeover, Human Rights Watch reported that LGBTQ+ Afghans were “sexually assaulted, or directly threatened by members of the Taliban because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Bilal reveals that there was a "kill list" being circulated to “deal” with LGBTQ+ Afghans – and he was on the list. Having moved from one safe house to another and fleeing towns, it caught him by surprise when the Taliban found out his exact location.
In its investigation on threats faced by the community after the Taliban’s takeover, Human Rights Watch reported that LGBTQ+ Afghans were “sexually assaulted, or directly threatened by members of the Taliban because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Bilal reveals that there was a "kill list" being circulated to “deal” with LGBTQ+ Afghans – and he was on the list. Having moved from one safe house to another and fleeing towns, it caught him by surprise when the Taliban found out his exact location.