LGBT Afghanis Face Extermination on The Hands of The Taliban (The US To do Something?)

                            Ahmed, 24, was studying in Kabul (Photo: Aryan Adam)

By Patrick Strudwick

Special Correspondent

OPINION

“There are only two penalties for gays: either stoning or he has to stand behind a wall that falls on him. The wall must be 2.5 to 3 metres high.” This is what Gul Rahim, a Taliban judge, told the German newspaper Bild last month. This practice is known as “wall-toppling”.  

On Monday, Nemat Sadat, the first gay Afghan to come out publicly, tweeted: “It’s not hyperbole to say that the Taliban will do what Nazis did to homosexuals: weed them out and exterminate them from Afghan society. Please help.”  

Where is that help? As we watch the frenzied scenes of Afghans rushing to the airport and clinging on to departing planes, we must remember that it is the strong who escape — if they’re lucky. Those who can run and fight, those with money and resources. The most important of which is the determination to live. But you only have that if you believe that you deserve to live, and that there could be a life for you somewhere.  

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Consider, then, the most hidden and hated in Afghanistan: LGBT people. Over the last 20 years, the West has known that they are beaten, tortured, evicted, fired, thrown in jail, and murdered with impunity. “Honour” killings abound. Since 2016 we have known, because NGOs have reported this, that the police rape gay men. In Taliban areas, sharia law has continued to apply, and so LGBT people are dead people walking.

But the near silence from Western nations (allied countries in particular) has revealed how little our liberal democracies really care. LGBT people are normally the great disposable card in the poker game of politics, but never more so than during war. 

Britain’s moral failing of the Afghan people will forever stain our country’s reputation

Of course, you can find the words on government websites that provide an overview of the situation. “They continued to face arrest by security forces and discrimination, assault, and rape,” said the US State Department’s country report on Afghanistan in 2020.   

What you cannot find is the actions. There isn’t even sufficient research. A 2019 report by ILGA (the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) concluded: “There is sparse evidence, anecdote and data being reported on the situations of sexual and gender minorities in the country, and there are no SOGI advocacy organisations or networks known of.”

What we do know is that if ever there were a time to act, when we know LGBT people are about to be slaughtered en masse, it is now.  

“For years LGBTQ+ Afghans have had to endure routine discrimination, abuse and persecution, including by the state. With the Taliban in power we expect this situation to deteriorate further,” Nancy Kelley, the chief executive of Stonewall, told me. She called on the British government to “step up now to put in place a rapid response humanitarian evacuation programme and help resettle Afghan people.” 

What will this take? It seems to me to be hard to appeal to Priti Patel’s empathy. So perhaps her own instinct for survival is where to aim: ask a selection of voters if someone who is about to buried in rubble for being gay should be given sanctuary.

The answer will be a lot less divided than our Home Secretary might believe. To help, urgently, is the popular, rather than populist move here. Any country, in particular those who invaded Afghanistan, that doesn’t will be tarnished forever.

But for this to happen, the Home Office needs to change rapidly and structurally. LGBT asylum seekers continue to struggle to gain refugee status in Britain, even when their life is in danger.

In 2018, I spent months working with an asylum lawyer on just one case of his to convey the barriers that still exist: his client was a young gay man from Bangladesh who was physically disabled, rejected by his family, outed, attacked, and threatened with murder. But the Home Office refused to believe he was gay because he also had a learning disability. It took six years and multiple appeals before he was granted asylum.

There is no time. And the dangers and barriers are not all visible. Many LGBT refugees do not know they can claim asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity. A girl I interviewed from the Central African Republic a few years ago told me that she wasn’t aware there was even a word for gay or lesbian because the only word used in her language was “demon-possessed”.

Here, then, we come to what many fail to understand: in territories where homosexuality is illegal it is not only the state-sanctioned violence that kills. It is the total blackout. To not see any evidence of others like you is, year after year, to be internally annihilated. How can we expect anyone to flee or fight for their life if they don’t even feel they exist?

Last year, in an interview with the Telegraph, a gay man from Kabal warned of what would happen if the Taliban took over. “My partner and I wouldn’t have a chance — and there are many others like us.” 

The wall is about to topple.

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(Sunday) By Jenn Selby

“The Taliban are here. They are in front of my house.”

This is the last message Aryan Adam, 41, an Afghan Briton living in London, received from his cousin, Ahmed (His picture above)

The 24-year-old student – whose name has been changed to protect his identity – had been anticipating that militants from the extremist group would arrive at his home in Kabul in a number of days and had expressed his fears to his family in the UK.

 But to his shock, the city fell in a matter of hours, causing chaos on the streets and at the airport as thousands attempted to flee.

“We spoke on Saturday evening, first about his study, which I have been financing from the UK,” Mr Adam told i.

“Weirdly the university had increased his credits, and claimed he suddenly owed them a lot of money, despite us having paid all that was due.

“There is a lot of corruption in Afghanistan. It seemed as though they were trying to get as much money as they could before they would be forced to close.”

His cousin’s education, Mr Adam said, was his Afghan family’s “only hope” of a decent future and the time, effort and money that had been invested in him so that he could learn and find a job was now in jeopardy.

Under the Taliban, mainstream universities and schools will be closed, and women banned from learning. In time, some institutions may open to male students, but these are likely only to teach religious doctrine.

“All of a sudden, [Ahmed] said, ‘Can I tell you something? I am tired of this life. I don’t think I can continue my studies. They think the university is going to close in a few days. In a few days the Taliban are going to take over Kabul and I am going to remain uneducated.’

“I told him, ‘Let’s see how it goes, maybe it won’t be too long until things open up again there.’ He said he was scared they were going to be worse than the last time they were there in the 1990s. 

“He wanted to leave the country, because if they come they are going to close all the schools. And he wanted to finish his education.”

The cousins spent some time discussing possible routes Ahmed could take to escape.

“I had heard the Taliban were letting people cross over the border into Iran, and I suggested Ahmed try that. But he had heard differently: that people had been killed attempting the journey,” Mr Adam continued.

“I told him to speak to some local people on the ground for advice, and to get back to me with what he found out.”

But on Sunday, Mr Adam received the chilling message from his cousin: “The Taliban are here. They are in front of my house.” 

He has been unable to get through to Ahmed or any other family members – via the phone or the internet – since.

“I am very worried about his safety, but I am also worried I won’t be able to get in touch with him any more and won’t be able to help him,” he said. “The internet connection was shaky anyway there, but now I’ve just got nothing. None of my other cousins in the country have been active on social media either.

“I have another cousin, *Zohra, she is very active, very confident. She has a hairdressing salon, and she looking into starting dentistry. I don’t think that is going to happen now, for sure.

“One, she is a woman who studies medicine; two, a hairdresser. Under the Taliban, you can’t dress like that. She did make-up for weddings.”

Human rights groups have expressed grave concerns for women in the country. Under Taliban rule, many of their freedoms are likely to be eroded, including their freedom to move around the city unaccompanied by male family members, or to wear anything except what the group considers to be “chaste attire”, such as a burqa. They will also lose their right to education.

Fears were raised in early July, when Taliban leaders who took control of the provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar issued an order to local religious leaders to provide them with a list of girls over the age of 15 for “marriage” to Taliban fighters. They also requested widows under the age of 45. It is not known whether the religious leaders complied.

“I would like both my cousins to leave if possible, and I want to help them,” Mr Adam said. “I want the British Government to consider the option of letting the family members of Afghan Britons be rescued and reunited in the UK.”

The Home Office is understood to be working on a bespoke refugee scheme and has put a block on any deportations to Afghanistan as the Taliban tightens its hold on the country. However, Boris Johnson is yet to confirm how many refugees Britain will take and who would be deemed eligible.

Asked whether there were any long-term plans to make it easier for refugees to access the UK, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “We’ll be setting out detail in the coming days on our approach to wider asylum claims.

“We’ll be speaking to other world leaders about how we can take a unified approach. I think it’s clear that no one country has the capability to deal with this alone and we want to work together on that.”

Mr Adam, a clinical data analyst, escaped from Afghanistan via Pakistan and India to seek asylum in the UK in 1995 when he was just a teenager.

His family were originally forced to escape the country following years of warlord infighting in Kabul, which, he says, “reduced the city to rubble”.

“The Taliban takeover my cousin described to me just reminded me when I was in Kabul when the warlords, who called themselves the ‘Mujahideen’, first came,” he said.

“I met my friend outside a big apartment block that had been built by the Russians. He asked me, ‘Have you seen what’s happening at the petrol station?’ I said no, and so we took the 10-minute walk to look. And there they were, hundreds of them, all with machineguns.

“Different factions came from different regions, and as soon as one came to took one part of Kabul, the other came and started fighting for another area.

“It was street-by-street fighting by all these factions. They turned Kabul into rubble. They killed people, stole, raped. They looted literally everything they could. We had no electricity. We had no water. We had to dig a well.  

“My immediate family got out of the country before the Taliban came the first time, but many stayed. The fighting stopped, but the draconian laws started.”

He said he’s enraged that the people of Afghanistan, including his family, have once again been left to their fates under the Taliban.

“The US have basically used Afghanistan since the early 1980s as a pawn in their fight with Russia, and the total annihilation of the country and its people is just seen as collateral damage. 

“The USA withdrawal is a continuation of that history. They see Afghan lives as worth less than theirs. They have left us alone again with a total disregard for Afghans, and Afghan lives.”