Five years after the Khawarij terrorists marched back into Kabul and seized power in August 2021, the world has grown disturbingly quiet about what is unfolding inside Afghanistan. The cries of a nation, vendors beaten in the streets, women erased from public life, children abused in detention, journalists silenced by force, have been reduced to footnotes in global news cycles. But the suffering of the Afghan people is not a footnote. It is a living, breathing catastrophe, and the latest research and reports from 2025 and 2026 confirm that things are not getting better. They are getting worse.
Let us be clear about what we are witnessing.
This is not Islam. This is not Sharia.
This is the brutal, sadistic rule of a terrorist group, a group whose commanders preach virtue by day while documented reports expose their exploitation and abuse by night. The religious label they wear is a stolen costume. Authentic Islamic scholarship across centuries has never sanctioned torture, public flogging of women, destruction of livelihoods, and the erasure of half a population from existence.
A System Built on Terror
In 2025 alone, more men and women were subjected to public flogging than in all the previous years combined since the Khawarij terrorists returned to power in 2021. Early indications in 2026 suggest the rate of such punishments may continue to escalate. Afghanistan’s de facto Supreme Court announced public floggings of at least 1,110 individuals, including at least 940 men and 170 women.
Local and international human rights organizations have highlighted the Taliban’s use of torture in detention facilities, including tooth and nail extraction, electric shocks, water boarding, and threats to kill victims’ relatives. These are not the acts of a government. These are the acts of a criminal gang wearing the robes of authority. No religion, no culture, and no civilization on earth can justify what is being done to the people of Afghanistan.
The hardworking poor, street vendors, cart pullers, roadside craftsmen, those who wake before sunrise to earn a lawful livelihood for their children, are being subjected to humiliation, beatings, and the destruction of their only source of income. Taliban morality enforcers, operating with sweeping powers, conduct raids and establish checkpoints across cities, stopping pedestrians and inspecting mobile phones. A fruit seller on a pavement, a carpenter carrying his tools, a laborer walking home in the dust of dusk, none are safe from this regime’s hunger for dominance and control.
Women and Girls: Erased from Existence
The UN Human Rights Council has delivered a damning assessment, warning that life for ordinary Afghans, especially women and girls, has worsened sharply. Since September 2025, Taliban security forces have prevented Afghan women, including UN staff, contractors, and visitors, from entering UN premises across the country.
Since taking power, the Taliban has steadily stripped away the rights of women and girls, including blocking girls from education beyond sixth grade, imposing severe restrictions on women’s right to work, severely limiting women’s freedom of movement, removing minimum age requirements for child marriage, and making domestic violence effectively unpunishable unless a woman has suffered a broken bone or visible injuries.
In December 2025, the civil society led People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan found the Taliban movement guilty of crimes against humanity, including gender persecution, gender apartheid, torture, and arbitrary detention, and called on the United Nations to codify gender apartheid as an international crime.
Journalists, Rights Workers, and the Culture of Silence
In 2025, the Afghanistan Journalists Center reported 205 media rights violations, a 13 percent increase compared to 2024, including two killings, three injuries, 166 threats, 34 detentions, and at least five journalists imprisoned.
Just weeks ago, Taliban authorities forcibly disappeared six staff members of the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation, a nongovernmental group providing legal assistance to vulnerable Afghans. No reason was given. No legal process was followed. People simply vanished, because they dared to help those the terrorists wish to keep helpless.
As recently as September 2026, Taliban security personnel raided an independent media office, verbally abused staff, seized equipment and documents, sealed the premises, and detained workers, continuing an escalating campaign against news organizations.
The World’s Shame
Nearly 40 percent of Afghanistan’s population is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The humanitarian crisis grew more acute in 2025 as the US government imposed massive cuts to foreign aid, and countries forced millions of Afghan refugees to return to Afghanistan, back into the arms of the very terrorists from whom they fled.
Violations of the right to life increased by 50 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, reaching 1,154 documented cases. More than 2,000 people were detained, including dozens of women accused of moral violations.
The international community must answer a simple question: how long will it keep watching? The UN Human Rights Council’s creation of an independent investigation mechanism in October 2025 was a step, but a step alone cannot stop a boot already pressing down on a people’s throat.
Afghanistan’s people, from the woman denied entry to a hospital without a male guardian, to the vendor whose cart is smashed by a terrorist with a rifle, to the child whose school door was shut and never reopened, are not statistics. They are human beings with dignity, dreams, and the absolute right to live free from fear and oppression.
History will judge this era. The question is whether it will judge the world as bystanders or as the conscience it was meant to be.
Based on reports from Human Rights Watch World Report 2026, Amnesty International 2025 Country Report, UN OHCHR, Rawadari Human Rights Situation Report 2025, UN Special Rapporteur findings, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (2026).
