Afghan woman accuses Taliban official of rape in video

ISLAMABAD (AP) — An Afghan woman accuses a senior Taliban official of forcing her into marriage and repeatedly raping her in a video that appeared on social media this week.

In the video, the woman, who identified herself only by her first name, Elaha, cried as she described being beaten and raped by former Taliban Interior Ministry spokesman Saeed Khosti.

She said she was speaking from an apartment in Kabul where the Taliban had held her after she tried to flee the country and was begging for rescue.

“These could be my last words. He’s going to kill me, but it’s better to die once than every time,” she said in the video, which surfaced on Tuesday.

Elaha’s situation since the video was released is unclear. Late Wednesday, the Kabul branch of the Supreme Court’s Twitter page said Elaha had been officially arrested and would soon be tried for defamation.

However, a new Supreme Court Twitter page created last month said in a post on Thursday that the other page was fake, referring to the post there about the arrest. The discrepancy could not immediately be clarified. Officials at the Supreme Court and the Interior Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on whether Elaha was officially arrested or not.

Since the Taliban took power in the country in August 2021, Afghan activists and Amnesty International have reported an increase in forced marriages of women. This includes cases in which Taliban officials have forced women to marry through intimidation or the intimidation of their families.

In tweets on Wednesday, Khosti confirmed that he had married Elaha but denied mistreating her. “I assure you that I have done nothing illegal,” he wrote. In recent months, Khosti has been removed from his spokesman post and it is not clear what his new position is.

In the video, Elaha identified herself as a medical student at Kabul University and the daughter of a former government intelligence general.

In the video, she said Khosti forced her to marry him six months ago, when he was still speaker. Khosti tried to marry her sister to another Taliban official, but her family successfully escaped, she said.

“Saeed Khosti beat me often. He raped me every night,” she said, bursting into tears.

She said she tried to flee to neighboring Pakistan, but the Taliban arrested her at the border crossing and took her back to Kabul, where she was locked in an apartment. After they brought her back, she heard a Taliban member tell Khosti that she had lived under the former government for 20 years and should be stoned to death as an infidel, she said.

Khosti said he divorced her after realizing she had “a problem with her faith” and accused her of insulting Islam’s holy book, the Quran.

Elaha’s video was widely shared on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp groups, sparking a wave of calls for help and denunciations of the Taliban from activists.

Since coming to power, the Taliban have imposed increasing restrictions on women. They have prevented many women from working, banned teenagers from attending school, and required women to cover their faces in public except for their eyes. The world refuses to recognize the Taliban’s rule and demands that they respect human rights and show tolerance towards other groups.

In a statement on Elaha’s case on Thursday, Human Rights Watch said it was “not surprising that a Taliban official feels free to commit forced marriages, rape, and physical assault,” given the numerous reports of such cases. The organization also said the Taliban had “systematically dismantled structures to combat violence against women and girls,” including shelters, legal aid programs, and law enforcement units and courts specializing in enforcing laws against violence against women.