International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan announced on Thursday that he had formally requested arrest warrants for two senior members of the Taliban terrorist organization running Afghanistan.
Khan accused Taliban “supreme leader” Haibatullah Akhundzada and his top judge, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, of crimes against humanity for “persecution on gender grounds,” emphasizing the abuse of women and those “not confirming with… ideological expectations of gender identity.”
The Taliban rules Afghanistan under a brutal interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, that deprives women and girls of almost all basic civil rights and bans them from existing in public. The most recent indignity Afghan women suffered at the hands of the Taliban was an edict that buildings could not have windows looking out into areas where a woman might be to prevent citizens from ever seeing a woman, even inside her home.
Khan has developed a reputation for being one of the most active prosecutors in ICC history. The ICC is an international court with authority to prosecute individual persons for crimes falling under three categories: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Khan spearheaded efforts to secure an arrest warrant for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in response to abuses during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering self-defense operations against the jihadist terror organization Hamas after the massacre of over 1,000 people in Israel on October 7, 2023.
The ICC’s jurisdiction arises from the Rome Statute, the international legal document that created the forum. It only has jurisdiction in countries that signed onto the Rome Statute; Afghanistan is a state party to the statute.
In a statement announcing his warrant requests, Khan accused the Taliban leaders of “persecuting Afghan girls and women, as well as persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women.” Among the crimes they stand accused of committing are violations of “the right to physical integrity and autonomy, to free movement and free expression, to education, to private and family life, and to free assembly.”
“Perceived resistance or opposition to the Taliban was, and is, brutally repressed through the commission of crimes including murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts,” Khan wrote.
“These applications recognize that Afghan women and girls as well as the LGBTQI+ community are facing an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban,” he explained. “Our action signals that the status quo for women and girls in Afghanistan is not acceptable. Afghan survivors, in particular women and girls, deserve accountability before a court of law.”
Khan hinted that he would soon apply for more warrants against other Taliban associates involved in the crimes against humanity.
The ICC will now process the warrant requests, a process that can often take months, but may require less time in this case as Taliban jihadists regularly boast of their abuses through official statements and state propaganda.
The Taliban’s “Ministry of Foreign Affairs” responded to the warrant requests by mocking the ICC as an “institution devoid of just legal basis” with “already non-existent credibility.” Calling the requests “duplicitous in nature and politically motivated,” the Taliban appeared to urge Khan to seek arrest warrants for American and other NATO officials involved in the 20-year Afghan War against it.
“Regrettably, this institution had turned a blind eye to the war crimes & crimes against humanity committed by foreign forces & their domestic allies during their twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan,” the Taliban statement read. “Such inappropriate behavior further erodes the already non-existent credibility of the said institution, and renders its status… & decisions completely meaningless on international level.”
The Taliban also applauded itself for allegedly bringing Afghanistan “nationwide peace. [I]ts people have breathed a sigh of relief, private prisons, kidnappings, islands of power and numerous other miseries and inhumane activities have been eradicated.”
The Taliban statement did not deny the accusations against Khan levied in the warrant request.
Taliban terrorists seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, after then-President Joe Biden announced that he would break an agreement brokered by President Donald Trump that would have seen American troops withdraw from the country on May 1, 2021. Extending the two-decade-old war resulted in the Taliban launching a campaign of conquest that rapidly ended the U.S.-backed regime of former President Ashraf Ghani, who fled Kabul without a fight that August.
Almost immediately after taking power, the Taliban ordered women to stay in their homes indefinitely and stopped women from returning to their workplaces. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid initially claimed women had to stay home for safety reasons and the organization would teach its jihadis how to “deal” with women, but the restrictions only became more severe following that promise.
The Taliban banned women and girls from obtaining an education after primary school, banned them from parks if men were present, and ultimately forbade them from showing their faces in public.
“It is very bad to see women in some areas, and our scholars also agree that women’s faces should be hidden,” Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue spokesman Molvi Mohammad Sadiq Akif told the Associated Press in August 2023. “It’s not that her face will be harmed or damaged. A woman has her own value and that value decreases by men looking at her. Allah gives respect to females in hijab and there is value in this.”
In December, the Taliban ordered that all buildings in the country be modified to remove windows that may look onto areas where women may exist.
“Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” the Taliban decree on the matter claimed, identifying areas for women as a “courtyard, kitchen, neighbor’s [water] well and other places.”
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