Saturday, November 6th, 2021
Apparently lured into a trap
Women’s rights activist killed in Afghanistan
In Mazar-i-Sharif, four women apparently paid with their lives trying to leave Afghanistan. She is said to have lured and killed two men under the pretext of wanting to take the women to the airport. Among them is a women’s rights activist known in the city.
Four women have been killed in northern Afghanistan, including apparently at least one women’s rights activist. The radical Islamist Taliban ruling in Afghanistan confirmed the discovery of four women’s bodies in a house in Mazar-i-Sharif and announced the arrest of two men in the context. The women wanted to leave the country and may have been lured into a trap.
“The detainees admitted during interrogation that they invited the women into the house,” Interior Ministry spokesman Kari Sajed Chosti said in a video message. “Further investigations are ongoing and the case has been referred to the court.” Chosti did not provide any details about the identity of the victims. At least one of the women killed was apparently a women’s rights activist. “I knew one of them, Frosan Safi,” said a women’s rights activist who worked for an international organization. “She was a women’s activist who was very well known in the city.”
According to a previous BBC report, the women wanted to go to Mazar-i-Sharif airport to leave the country. Activist circles said they received a call that they believed was an invitation to an evacuation flight. Accordingly, they were picked up by a car and later found dead. She herself received a phone call three weeks ago from someone who pretended to help her leave Afghanistan, the international organization said. But she became suspicious and blocked the caller.
For a long time, the Bundeswehr had its largest field camp in the north of the country in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban then took the city in mid-August. Since the Taliban came to power across Afghanistan, many human rights activists have left the country for fear of oppression and violence by the Islamists.
The Taliban had largely banned women from public life during their first rule in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Isolated protests by women, for example for the return of girls to school, have recently been repeatedly resolved. But the leaders of the Islamists underlined that their fighters were not authorized to kill activists and threatened to punish them.