Zan Times Exposes Femicide Under Taliban Rule, Published in partnership with The Guardian

In a voice message recorded weeks before she died, Liza Shams, 33, asks a relative to pray for her. “There’s no end to my days of misfortune,” she says. “Pray that God shames Hasib [her husband] in front of the whole world for what he has done to me.” Liza was found dead shortly afterwards. Her death was recorded as a suicide.

She is one of 231 cases documented in a major new investigation by Zan Times, published in partnership with The Guardian, examining femicide in Afghanistan, where men are increasingly empowered to murder women and face no punishment, whilst their crimes are covered up by the Taliban.

What the Investigation Found

Reporters found that domestic violence cases are increasingly being recorded as suicides by the Taliban. Women brought to hospital bearing signs of beatings, wounds, and bruises are routinely labelled as having taken their own lives.

Fereshta Emadi, 33, a UN agency employee in Kabul, was found dead in her home in May 2026. Her husband told Taliban she had died by suicide, citing a psychiatric condition. Five people who knew her said Fereshta — who had been married off at 17 — had spent fifteen years being beaten, choked, and controlled. Her family and friends believe she was killed by her husband. No arrest was made.

Under Taliban rule, there is no functioning mechanism through which women can report abuse, seek protection, or access justice. The same legal architecture that bans women from education and employment also removes their standing before the courts and their access to legal aid. The Taliban’s Criminal Procedural Code, introduced in January 2026, further entrenched these barriers. Violence against women is not incidental to Taliban governance. It is enabled by it.

The Investigation

This investigation was produced by Zan Times fellows — 14 selected earlier this year from over 750 applicants. The 231 femicide cases documented across 10 provinces represent months of covert fieldwork, source protection, and editorial rigour under conditions that would deter most journalists anywhere in the world.

In just seven months of 2026, 36 Afghan women have reported for Zan Times, most from inside Afghanistan. Nine of them have been published in The Guardian. This is not a small media outlet producing occasional reports from exile. It is a functioning newsroom producing primary-source journalism in one of the most restricted information environments in the world — with Afghan women at every level of the editorial process.

Why This Matters

The documentation produced by Zan Times is not just journalism, but documentation and evidence collection. The 231 cases in this investigation (i.e., names, provinces, circumstances, patterns of impunity) form part of the evidentiary record that the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan (IIIM-A) and future accountability processes will need to draw upon. Afghan women journalists are building that record at personal risk, in real time, from inside the country.

Read the full investigation: The Guardian /

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