Shokria was eight when she first experienced the violence inflicted on Afghan families by the Taliban, watching her father publicly whipped and dragged through the streets.
Soon afterwards, she watched her teenage aunt forcibly married to a Taliban fighter. More than two decades later, she still does not know whether her aunt is alive or dead.
Now 33, Shokria speaks to me from Pakistan, where she is waiting for an asylum decision after fleeing Afghanistan following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
Yet her story spans decades, beginning with the Taliban regime denying her an education as a child and culminating in their brutal torture that nearly killed her as an adult.
Born in 1993 into a middle-class family in a small Afghan village, Shokria grew up during the Taliban’s first regime.
Her father had served as a military officer under former president Mohammad Najibullah, making him a target after the Taliban seized power.
‘The entire country was filled with fear and terror,’ she recalls in an interview with the Daily Mail. ‘People were so afraid that they did not even dare say the word “Taliban” out loud.’
Under the terror regime’s rule, poverty, hunger and unemployment were widespread.
Shokria pictured in the hospital, where she often is due to ongoing physical pain from the Taliban’s abuse
Shokria shows the injuries she sustained from Taliban beatings
Shokria’s injuries after being beat up by the Taliban
Shokria remembers those days well. ‘When we sat down to eat, my mother would break dry bread into small pieces and give each of us one piece. None of us had the right to ask for more food,’ she says. ‘Many nights I cried quietly from hunger.’
One night, armed Taliban fighters stormed into their home, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they searched for her father.
‘They tortured my mother, beating her brutally and shouting: “Where is your infidel husband? The one who worked with the infidel government and fought against the Islamic Emirate. He must be killed,”‘ Shokria says.
Terrified, Shokria’s mother insisted her husband had died in the war.
The next day, Taliban commanders gathered villagers at the mosque and announced a new rule: widows without a male guardian would be forced to marry Taliban fighters. Families who refused would face death.
To save his wife, Shokria’s father surrendered himself. He was publicly whipped, his face smeared with motor oil in humiliation, paraded through the village and imprisoned.
To secure his release, the family was forced to hand over Shokria’s 17-year-old aunt as a bride to a Taliban fighter.
‘I heard that she was taken to Kandahar (Taliban headquarters). From that day until today, we have never seen or heard from her again,’ Shokria says.
‘During that time people were afraid even to show that they had daughters. If the Taliban learned that a family had daughters older than thirteen, they would force them into marriage with Taliban members or take them away by force.’
Shokria says the fear imposed during those years did not disappear when the Taliban’s first regime collapsed, creating a legacy where restrictions on women and girls only grew stronger.
After her father returned to work under the Republic government, schools reopened and young Shokria begged her family to allow her to study.
‘You are a girl. Girls do not go to school, it is shameful. You must stay at home and learn housework,’ her mother would tell her.
Families who allowed their girls to study were insulted by tribal elders. ‘You have no honour,’ people would say. ‘You have no dignity. Tomorrow these educated girls will rebel against the tribe.’
Shokria secretly enrolled in a literacy programme for girls who had been denied education.
With help from her grandmother, she attended classes in secret for a year, learning to read and write for the first time.
‘Those were truly some of the happiest days of my life,’ she says.
Eventually, after help from one of her teachers, her parents reluctantly agreed to let her attend school properly. But as she grew older, the pressure to marry became relentless.
When she was in eighth grade, she returned home one afternoon to find tribal elders gathered inside her house.
They had come to arrange her marriage to a wealthy man who already had a wife and children, a man whose own daughter was older than Shokria.
‘They were talking about money, carpets, gold, houses and wedding expenses as if I were an object being sold in a market,’ she recalls.
Still wearing her school uniform, she confronted them, saying: ‘If you have come here to marry me to a man who is the same age as my father, then you have made a mistake.
‘I will not allow myself to become another innocent woman sacrificed to these ignorant traditions. No one has the right to force me into marriage without my consent.’
After her speech, a man slapped her across the face and she was dragged from the room and severely beaten.
He shouted: ‘You went to school and studied, and now you talk about rights and freedom.’
Later she learned that her fourteen-year-old sister had been promised to the same man, now in his fifties.
She remembers elderly women beating drums at the wedding while her sister, still a child, played outside unaware of what was happening.
As relatives dressed her in bridal clothes and painted her hands with henna, the terrified girl clung to Shokria and begged: ‘Tell father not to give me to them. Tell mother I will behave and never upset her again. I will not fight with you anymore.’
‘She still did not understand that this was her wedding day,’ Shokria says. ‘For her it was the day her life would be destroyed.’
Shokria (third from left) built a career in Afghanistan’s Ministry of National Defense and later worked in human rights and women’s empowerment programmes across the country
Shokria wore her military uniform with pride, and people would ask her for photographs
Six months later, Shokria visited her sister in a remote village. She recalls: ‘A woman with a swollen pregnant belly ran out of the house to embrace me. It was my sister.
‘I looked at my parents and told them I would never forgive them.’
Years later, Shokria joined the Afghan National Army, eventually becoming one of 110 Afghan women selected for military training in Turkey.
She built a career in Afghanistan’s Ministry of National Defense and later worked in human rights and women’s empowerment programmes across the country.
‘I loved my military uniform deeply,’ she says. ‘When I wore it, I felt like a strong, capable officer and a powerful woman.
‘When I walked through the streets of Kabul, some people warned me that the Taliban might kill me. Others encouraged me and even took photos with me.’
She was also, as the eldest child, financially supporting her entire family as well as pursuing a master’s degree.
But when the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Shokria’s dream life disappeared almost overnight.
She lost her job and was barred from finishing her studies as the Taliban began dismantling women’s rights once again.
Women were forbidden from leaving their homes without a male chaperone, while oppressive dress codes caused them to faint from the intense heat.
‘Afghanistan became a prison for women that is worse than hellfire,’ she says.
Forty days after Kabul fell, Taliban fighters raided her family home in the middle of the night. Shokria and her father were beaten and arrested.
Shokria, who had spent more than a decade working as an officer in Afghanistan’s Ministry of National Defense, was accused of betraying Islam and collaborating with foreigners.
After being held at an unofficial detention site in Kabul, she was brutally tortured, suffering shattered kneecaps and a concussed head.
‘From the moment I arrived, I was met with shouting, threats, and humiliation,’ she says. ‘I was told I had no rights and that if I spoke, things would get worse.
‘[Taliban fighters] said that I had “eaten the Americans’ bread” and was therefore a traitor. They called me an “infidel woman” and a “slave”.
‘These insults were repeated over and over until I felt I had no human worth.’
The interrogations involved shouting, threats and beatings. ‘If I remained silent or refused to answer, I would face even greater violence,’ she says.
‘There was no lawyer, no oversight, no contact with the outside world. I was completely at the mercy of armed individuals and had no way to defend myself or escape.’
To this day, Shokria takes a cocktail of drugs for physical pain stemming from the prison abuse she endured, along with antidepressants for PTSD.
When Shokria and her father were finally released, the family fled Afghanistan.
The journey out was brutal as they crossed borders in dangerous conditions, without shelter or adequate food.
During the journey, Shokria’s sister, the same one who had been married at fourteen, was in a serious accident, becoming severely injured and losing her baby.
There were no medical facilities and she ultimately died.
A Taliban security personnel stands guard as Afghan burqa-clad women wait in queue
Shokria survived by taking whatever work she could find, from washing dishes to picking fruit in an orchard (Shokria pictured in yellow)
‘Her children were left motherless,’ Shokria says. ‘The children, who are still so young, ask me every day why their mother is gone. There is no answer that can soothe this pain.’
After fleeing first to Iran, then Pakistan, she survived by taking whatever work she could find, from washing dishes to picking fruit in an orchard.
Shokria, who is currently waiting for a visa to move to Latin America, says that the Taliban’s influence still impacts Afghan women even after they have left the country
Many asylum systems require documents issued by Taliban-controlled offices, forcing women to identify themselves to the same authorities they are trying to escape.
When Shokria attempted to obtain the paperwork she needed, Taliban officials recognised her military background.
They told her: ‘You worked with foreigners. You are not a Muslim woman.’ She was nearly arrested again.
She escaped only after, as she puts it, ‘a lot of pleading and crying’.
‘When the world does not officially recognise the Taliban,’ she asks: ‘Why are documents stamped and approved by Taliban offices accepted?
‘This issue puts the lives of thousands of innocent and vulnerable women at risk of death.’
Earlier this year, the Taliban introduced a new penal code creating a caste system which puts women on the same level as ‘slaves’.
As part of the new law, husbands are permitted to beat their wives as long as there is no serious bodily harm.
Article 32 states that only if the husband beats the woman with a stick and this act results in severe injury such as ‘a wound or bodily bruising’, and the woman can prove it before a judge, will the husband be sentenced to fifteen days’ imprisonment.
However, the contradiction lies in that a woman must remain fully covered while simultaneously proving her injuries to a judge.
She is also required to be accompanied by a male chaperone, which is usually the husband himself.
Shokria describes the new law as an ‘official order for the destruction of women’, adding that she is disappointed in the international community for not fighting for the 25 million women suffering in Afghanistan.
‘We are prisoners and nobody helps us,’ she says, ‘and the world ignores our cries. We are just trying to survive.’
