“The death of Hazara is permissible.” What it is like to protest against the Taliban as a minority woman.

After the Taliban seized control of Kabul in August 2021, Tamana Rezaei took to the streets to protest against the growing gender segregation in her country. As a woman and a member of the Hazara minority, she was doubly at risk., a story she tells below.

My activism began in Jaghuri, Ghazni, where I was born. As a Hazara girl, I faced discrimination and disadvantage on many levels. Since there was no girls' school in my village, I had to attend a boys' school. When my uncle tried to force me into marriage as a teenager – a common tradition in my region – my mother, who had been a child bride herself, prevented this.

My mother's resistance awakened my revolutionary spirit. The day she stopped my forced marriage, I realized that if every woman resisted, the lives of all women would change. When I was still a teenager, I formed a group with four friends to talk to people in our village about forced marriage and its devastating consequences for women and children.

I had certain privileges because my father supported me, which is not always the case for girls in Afghanistan. He lamented: “I am very sorry that you were born with this talent and genius in a country like Afghanistan, where it is drowning in misogyny.” After high school, I moved away from Ghazni to study law at Kabul University.

As a Hazara, I have always been particularly conscious of the oppression and discrimination we constantly face. 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 rule of Nur Mohammad Taraki in 1978-79. In Dasht-e-Barchi, a Hazara neighborhood in Kabul that has been the scene of many attacks and suicide bombings, my friends and I started a campaign for girls' education. Thanks to these efforts, many families were able to send their daughters to school.

Since then, I have participated in protests, from small university demonstrations to larger movements. In 2014, we protested against the beheading of an eight-year-old Hazara girl by the Taliban in Zabul. Later, we organized protests against the beheading of 11 Hazara civilians by the Taliban on the Kabul highway in Bamiyan. In 2015, I played a significant role in founding the Enlightenment Movement, a youth movement formed to protest against the injustices in the development of Hazara communities. I later lost many friends from this movement after the suicide attack on a peaceful protest in 2016 that killed at least 85 people and injured 413.

When I was young, I believed that men had more power than women simply because of their gender. After becoming financially independent, I realized that power comes from work and income. “He who gives the bread, gives the orders” is a saying that I understand very well today. And that is exactly why the Taliban prevented women from working – to take away their power and maintain the apartheid regime.

After university, I started my own law firm where I prosecuted and imprisoned several Taliban soldiers and the organizers of suicide bombings. One of the cases I prosecuted was the murder of my father in 2019 by the Taliban for building schools and teaching girls in Jaghuri. The defendants were sentenced to thirty years in prison, but I received many threats from the Taliban and other groups because I prosecuted such cases.

In the summer of 2021, when the provinces began to fall and the Taliban released prisoners from prisons, I looked for a safe place for myself and my family and, on the advice of a neighbor who was a former soldier, burned all my documents except my university diploma. However, in September 2021, I joined the ranks of protesters in the Hazara region west of Kabul. During our peaceful demonstrations, the Taliban beat us and sprayed us with pepper spray. When they blocked the streets, we continued our protests from home and found various ways to raise our voices, such as wearing men's clothes, organizing theater performances, participating in social and cultural activities, and painting walls.

But despite our efforts, the protesters were eventually arrested one by one. The day of my arrest was grim. It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie where the military raids a terrorist group, only in this case the Taliban's target was just a group of protesting women whose only weapon is their voice. The street was filled with military vehicles and Taliban soldiers banging on the gates and breaking them down, threatening to shoot us. They searched us roughly, took our phones and interrogated us before dividing us into different groups and taking us to the Interior Ministry. I was terrified.

The next day, before sunrise, three Taliban fighters entered the room where we were being held and mercilessly kicked the children sleeping outside the door. One of the fighters called my name, held up my phone and asked, “Is this your phone?” I said no, but started crying when I saw my father's photo on the screen. He forced me to unlock it and started looking through my videos. After watching a video of our protest, the fighters asked me why I was not wearing a hijab and why I was shouting in the street. Then they opened my private photos.

Another Taliban member, who was killed by the other fighters Hello Sahib (Deputy Sir) asked me in Pashto, “Did you go to the protest yourself or did someone encourage you?” I replied in fear, “Yourself.” He beat me so hard that every time I saw him after that, I felt like my heart would stop and I was shaking in fear. He started abusing me. A Pashto-speaking woman protester came between us and explained to the Taliban member that I do not understand Pashto and started translating for me. Then the Taliban member opened another video showing the same Pashto-speaking woman and took her away.

During my interrogation, the Taliban fighters told me that the death of Hazaras was permissible because they “Rafizi locations”, a derogatory term they use for Shiites, and we are all absolute infidels. They said that if they killed us, they would open the gates of heaven. They also mentioned that if they were not under pressure from their superiors, they would have killed us immediately after our arrest. In the days that followed, they came late at night to take us to their interrogation rooms, where they tried to force us to reveal the whereabouts of the other protesting girls.

I soon began to consider suicide as a way out. But another of the protesting prison girls tried to urge me to think about seeing my mother and sister again, even though that prospect seemed like a distant dream.

After twenty days of detention in Taliban prisons, I was released only after strict guarantees and a written commitment to stop my activities. My mother later told me that she became ill shortly after my detention and asked the Taliban to release me. Having my mother's pride broken was the worst part of my detention and torture.

After my release from prison, I left Afghanistan secretly. It took me a long time, and still takes a long time, to process what happened to me. But today, the trials and growing awareness among Afghan women about the Taliban's gender segregation are beginning to heal the wounds it inflicted on our souls and bodies. I believe that international recognition of the Taliban's gender segregation will eventually end their rule and open avenues to bring its members to justice.

Tamana Rezaei, an activist and law graduate, worked as a lawyer in Afghanistan until the Taliban took power.

This article is part of the series “Inside the Taliban's Gender Apartheid,” 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.

Further reading

Image: Rome, World 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.