Divorce, smartphones and control – BBC sees how Taliban run Afghanistan

Inside the Taliban’s Northern Courts: A Divorce Petition Exposes the Machinery of Control

Constantvpn.com – In the offices of Sheberghan city, capital of Jawzjan province in northern Afghanistan, an eighteen-year-old woman stands before the provincial governor and demands her freedom from a marriage she says has been defined by months of physical abuse. Her face is entirely concealed behind a full-face veil and dark sunglasses. Her voice, however, is steady. She has made up her mind, and no amount of persuasion from the grey-bearded former Taliban commander seated across from her will alter that decision.

The scene, captured over two years of embedded reporting by the BBC, offers an unfiltered window into how the Taliban govern at the local level — five years after they toppled the US-backed government in August 2021 and restored what they call an Islamic emirate. What unfolds in that Jawzjan office is not merely a family dispute. It is a microcosm of a system in which women have been systematically stripped of education, employment, mobility, and legal autonomy.

The Petitioner and the Governor

The woman, identified only as Tuba to protect her privacy, accuses her husband of sustained beatings. Under the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia, a wife seeking divorce must typically return some or all of the financial gifts her husband provided at the time of marriage. A settlement is negotiated. In Tuba’s case, her husband demands four times the customary amount. Her family refuses.

Governor Abdullah Sarhadi, who once commanded Taliban forces during the movement’s first period of rule in the 1990s, attempts to talk her out of the petition. He urges compromise, warning that a divorced woman will find remarriage difficult and that her social standing will suffer.

“Ask yourself: ‘Who would marry me after I get my divorce?’ You’ll have to compromise a lot or you’ll lose your dignity and honour.”

Tuba’s reply is immediate and unflinching:

“Mr Governor, my honour and dignity have already been ruined.”

Her husband, seated nearby, waits his turn to speak. The governor ultimately instructs that the woman be given her own room and that officials will warn the husband not to strike her again — adding that failure to comply would result in his being jailed. Tuba’s father, dissatisfied with the outcome, later states the family intends to pursue the divorce through the formal court system, despite the well-known difficulty women face in obtaining a divorce without their husband’s consent under the Taliban’s judiciary.

A Governor’s Past and Present

Sarhadi’s biography is itself a compressed history of the conflict. During the Taliban’s first rule in the 1990s, he served as a military commander in Bamiyan province — the same province home to the colossal ancient Buddha statues that the Taliban dynamited in 2001, provoking global outrage. When the US-led coalition invaded in late 2001, Sarhadi was among thousands of insurgents who surrendered. He spent several years in US detention at Guantanamo Bay before eventual release.

Upon the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, he was appointed governor of Bamiyan and subsequently of Jawzjan. By the time of the late-June encounter described here, he had also taken on the role of deputy commander of a military corps in the northern province of Kunduz.

After the divorce exchange, Sarhadi makes a remark that draws laughter from the male officials, bodyguards, and village elders gathered in the room: he describes women as “mindless” and “deficient in intellect.” The comment lands without correction or rebuke.

Smartphones, Statues, and the Question of Change

Later in the same office, Sarhadi taps an old-style mobile phone with a tiny screen and complains that a recent Taliban ban on smartphones for officials has slowed administrative work. He recalls being able to send quick messages, transmit documents, and receive answers rapidly. If he says anything further about the ban, he notes, “it will cause trouble.”

Asked about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas — an act that defined the Taliban’s first era for much of the world — Sarhadi initially deflects. Eventually he acknowledges responsibility, stating plainly that he destroyed the statues. His worldview, in other respects, appears largely continuous with the hard-line reading of Islamic religious law the movement imposed in the 1990s.

Five Years of Exclusion

The divorce petition is one thread in a broader pattern. Since 2021, Afghan women have been barred from secondary schools, excluded from most workplaces, denied university access, prohibited from travelling alone, and kept from parks and leisure centres. The BBC’s two-year reporting effort, which included time spent with men who once planned suicide attacks or lived for years in underground hideouts before becoming officials and soldiers, found a consistent tension: these men wished to project reasonableness yet showed little appetite for discussing the violence of their past. Unease between rulers and ruled surfaced repeatedly.

Afghan women interviewed over the same period describe lives rendered unrecognisable by five years of Taliban governance. The eighteen-year-old in the Jawzjan office, veiled and sunglasses-shielded, arguing calmly for her own body and her own future, embodies both the constraint and the quiet defiance that now define daily existence under the movement’s rule.