LGBTQ+ Afghans fear being forgotten 100 days since Taliban takeover

As he struggled to wrench his hair from the grasp of a heavily armed Taliban fighter, Mohammad – a gay Afghan man – realised he had two options: run or die.

Minutes earlier, he had been stopped at a checkpoint in Kabul and forced to hand over his mobile phone for inspection. Mohammad was terrified – he knew the Taliban guard would find material on his phone that revealed his sexuality.

“He started searching the gallery and photos and videos and gave me a really strong slap in the face. He said you must have been fucked many times and started using really abusive words,” said Mohammad, a pseudonym used to protect his identity.

“He said, ‘We’re going to hang you’,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Mohammad pulled his hair free from the fighter’s grip and ran, escaping into the scattering crowd as bullets flew overhead.

“I’m very thankful that the crowd didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “Because if they had known, I’m sure they would have joined hands and I wouldn’t have come out alive.”

Soon after the incident, Mohammad was able to flee to neighbouring Pakistan, but 100 days since the hardline Islamist Taliban returned to power on Aug. 15, hundreds of other LGBTQ+ Afghans are in hiding and increasingly desperate to leave.

Many of those left behind fear for their lives as reports of threats, harassment and violence become more common, urging foreign governments to help them flee abroad.

During the Taliban’s first rule, from 1996 to 2001, there were reports that men accused of having gay sex were sentenced to death and crushed by walls pushed over by tanks.

This time around, the Taliban has sought to present a more moderate face on some issues – such as women’s education, but it has said LGBTQ+ rights will not be respected under its strict interpretation of Sharia law.

TARGETED

Campaigners say far from having changed, the Islamist group is targeting members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“The Taliban is actively seeking out LGBTQI persons … to kill them,” said Kimahli Powell, executive director of Canadian human rights organisation Rainbow Railroad.

Powell’s group, alongside human rights organisations Stonewall and Micro Rainbow, and the British foreign ministry, helped evacuate 29 LGBTQ+ Afghans to Britain last month. Five more followed at the beginning of November.

U.S. novelist Nemat Sadat, a gay Afghan-American who left his homeland aged five and returned to teach at an Afghan university from 2012 to 2013, has also been helping LGBTQ+ people flee Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

So far, he has helped 55 people cross the border into Pakistan and secured an additional seven seats on a charter flight for evacuees to Abu Dhabi. Another three on his list have independently reached Britain.

Yet he still has a list of 650 LGBTQ+ people desperate to leave the country.

“It’s a very small fraction of the number of people that I have,” Sadat said. “The problem is enormous.”

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