Zholia Parsi: In Directorate 40, women were tortured with cables and electric shocks

Zholia Parsi, a women's rights activist and one of the founders of the spontaneous women's protest movement in Afghanistan, has recently shared her harrowing experience in Taliban prisons in an interview with Afghanistan International. She was arrested in early Mizan 1402 (September 2023) and imprisoned for three months. She says physical torture was only a part of her suffering—suffering that turned into deeper psychological torment through threats of arrest and harm to her family.

Parsi emphasized that from the moment of her arrest, she was subjected to sexual insults, death threats, and lengthy interrogations. She said the Taliban repeatedly threatened that if she didn’t provide the information they wanted, they would imprison her daughters or force them into marriage.

She also spoke of physical torture such as beatings, electric shocks, and damage to her hearing, adding that at night, the screams of young women and men being tortured in the same detention center could be heard from the cells.

Her account aligns with findings by the World Organization Against Torture, which in a recent report exposed widespread torture, sexual violence, psychological abuse, and arbitrary detentions in Taliban detention centers, especially at Directorate 40 of the intelligence agency.