A former Afghan policewoman told the U.K.’s Daily Mail newspaper on Tuesday that Taliban jihadists “brutally” beat her with “weapons and stones” as she tried to flee Kabul via Hamid Karzai International Airport in recent days.
Gulafroz Ebtekar, 34, was the first woman in Afghanistan to graduate from a police academy with a master’s degree and formerly held the position of “Deputy Chief for Criminal Investigations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Afghanistan,” according to her own account. She told the Daily Mail she attempted to flee Kabul in the days following the Taliban terror group’s seizure of the city on August 15, though her efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
Ebtekar said she initially “found US soldiers and believed they were helping her to fly abroad with her boyfriend and family members.” She did not provide dates for the alleged incident.
Taliban Fateh fighters, a “special forces” unit, patrol a street in Kabul on August 29, 2021, as suicide bomb threats hung over the final phase of the US military’s airlift operation from Kabul, with President Joe Biden warning another attack was highly likely before the evacuations end. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)
“We got to the refugee camp where the Americans were stationed,” she said, according to the Daily Mail. “When the American soldiers were already near, I exhaled, I thought we were finally safe.”
“I speak a little English. I explained that it was not safe for us to remain in Kabul. They checked our documents. I had my ID, passport, and police certificates with me,” the ex-police officer said.
The U.S. soldiers then allegedly asked Ebtekar and her boyfriend, “Where do you want to go?”
“It doesn’t matter, to a safe country where there is a chance we may survive,” Ebtekar said she replied.
“They looked at me and answered quite impudently: ‘Okay.’ And they asked one soldier to show us the way. I thought they would escort us to a plane or provide security,” the woman recounted.
Ebtekar said the soldiers first escorted her to “a crowded street where there was a terrorist attack,” though she did not elaborate on the alleged terror incident.
“We did not want to leave,” Ebtekar said. “Then the soldier raised his weapon [and said]: ‘Get out of here.’ So we went out onto the road,” the ex-policewoman claimed.
Ebtekar then returned to her home in Kabul where she said she was told by her mother the Taliban had come looking for her while she was away. Ebtekar then moved from her family home to “the first of three flats she has used to try and stay out of the hands of the militants,” according to the Daily Mail.
“When she tried to escape to Kabul airport again, the Taliban guards beat her with ‘weapons and stones,'” according to the newspaper.
Taliban fighters patrol a street in Kabul on August 29, 2021. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)
Another former Afghan policewoman named Zala Zazai who successfully fled Afghanistan for Tajikistan in recent days told the BBC on September 1 she “was still in touch with other former policewomen.” She described the tactics currently used by the Taliban to track down women like her for retribution. The hardline Sunni terrorist group banned women from working or going to school when it first ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001. A Taliban spokesman demanded all women nationwide stay home indefinitely last week.
“The Taliban call them [ex-policewomen] from their office phones and ask them to come to work, and ask for their home address,” Zazai said.
She added that “even in Tajikistan she was not totally out of the reach of the Taliban. Her mother, who is with her, received messages urging both women to return to Afghanistan and ‘live in the Islamic way.'”
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