KABUL, Afghanistan – It started out as a quarrel between boys: Naseebullah Barakzai, 13, was upset when a neighbor boy stole fruit and tore limbs from his family’s pomegranate tree and pushed the younger boy to the ground, relatives say.
Just two days later, Naseebullah was dead and his village in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan was in an uproar. His family and other residents accuse an influential police checkpoint commander of being on the other boy’s side, kidnapping and raping Naseebullah, and fatally injuring him.
It is the type of sexual assault that is widespread within the Afghan security forces. Child abuse has been ritualized in other forms: a practice in which powerful men molest boys and force them to dress and dance in girls’ clothes is widely known as bacha bazi, or boy play.
Poor families have suffered for years as commanders and their husbands chased them, part of a wider culture of corruption by the security forces that led to reform efforts by the military and police. However, officials were reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront, the endemic problem of child sexual abuse – including Bacha Bazi and forced marriages – even though these practices were officially banned.
In the case of Naseebullah, however, public outrage seems to be forcing a rare reckoning.
Naseebullah’s family, supported by a crowd of elders from the village of Karezak, marched into the offices of Kandahar Governor Hayatullah Hayat to seek justice and the arrest of Police Commander First Lt. Call for Mullah Roozi Khan. And it worked: the government quickly arrested Lieutenant Khan and six of his officers, who are in jail, while an official investigation is ongoing to see if they should be charged.
Naseebullah’s mother and brother said that Lieutenant Khan and his men kidnapped, beaten, and raped the sixth grader, who was dumped in a hospital the next day. They said hospital officials told them that Naseebullah had suffered serious internal injuries before he died on September 18, and that the men who dropped him claimed he fell off a roof.
The doctor who operated on the boy said, on condition of anonymity, that he observed extensive internal injuries associated with a forced entry.
The allegations against the commander examine the jurisdiction of the US-backed Afghan government, which has only limited influence in provinces outside the capital Kabul. As Afghan and Taliban negotiators discuss a possible peace deal, militants are still launching nationwide attacks to expose the government’s inability to protect its citizens in highly contested provinces like Kandahar.
In these circumstances, the dead boy’s family and neighbors are calling for government action in a district that is nominally under state control.
“I want President Ghani to give us justice – nothing else,” said Naseebullah’s mother, Bibi Amina, 50, of President Ashraf Ghani. “This crime defamed the name of Islam.”
Naseebullah’s brother, Ehsanullah Barakzai, 26, said the governor had assured the family that no one, not even a powerful police commander, was above the law. But he said those guilty often go with impunity if they are rich or influential.
“We still don’t know whether this criminal will be punished or released,” Ehsanullah said of the detained commandant.
The lieutenant and his men could not be reached for comment and have been transferred to a prison in Kabul in the past few days while the investigation continued.
Kandahar Criminal Police director Wali Mohammad Askar said his office will conduct a thorough investigation and publicly announce the results. “We assure everyone in Kandahar, and especially the relatives of the victim, that no one who is guilty will be spared justice,” said Askar.
In similar cases across the country, authorities have promised to investigate to quietly release suspects after interest has waned.
“When powerful people are involved, we often don’t hear about the investigation after the first few days,” said Shaharzad Akbar, chairman of the independent human rights commission in Afghanistan.
Ms. Akbar said families often do not report child sex crimes out of shame or fear of official retaliation. In Naseebullah’s case, the family asked the Kandahar human rights group office to monitor the case and consult the authorities to ensure transparency, she said.
In Logar province, south of Kabul, a local child advocacy group published testimony last November from 165 students who said they had been raped by teachers, school principals and police officers. Afghan national intelligence quickly arrested the two advocacy leaders and forced them to publicly retract the allegations.
After the American embassy in Kabul and human rights groups intervened, the two lawyers were released. since then one has fled Afghanistan. Twenty suspects have been arrested and charged with rape of the boys, and four of them have been tried, Ms. Akbar said.
Jamshid Rasuli, spokesman for the Afghan Prosecutor General, said the office had carried out “a comprehensive and expanded investigation” into Logar and would announce the results soon.
In July, four Afghan security forces, including a company commander, were arrested on charges of raping and beating a 13- and 14-year-old boy at a battalion headquarters in Takhar province, northern Afghanistan. The 13-year-old’s cousin, Qurban Ali Hairat, said he found the boys in a room at the battalion base, both injured so badly they couldn’t walk. He said they told him they were raped by soldiers.
Brig. General Mohammad Ali Yazdani, commander of the 217th Pamir Corps in Takhar, said military prosecutors were investigating the case while the soldiers remained in custody.
In 2015, a New York Times investigation found that Afghan security forces committed widespread sexual assault on boys and that the American military was reluctant to intervene. The article reported that an American captain was released from command and a sergeant was pressured to withdraw after confronting and pushing an Afghan militia commander who raped a boy.
The investigation led to a report by the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan on the reluctance of the military to confront the centuries-old Bacha Bazi practice.
Afghanistan violated the national criminal code of bacha bazi and similar crimes in 2017. The penalty for violating the law is three years in prison – three to five years if the dancing is “a public event”. However, human rights activists say the codes are rarely enforced.
In Kandahar, the governor’s spokesman promised that Naseebullah would do justice. “Nobody is above the law and we pledge to obey the rule of law and we will complete the investigation soon,” said the spokesman, Baher Ahmadi.
The dead boy’s mother was not convinced.
“The government puts innocent people in prison, but the criminals and perpetrators remain free,” said Ms. Amina.
Mohammad Nazem, a neighbor in the Dand district where Naseebullah lived, said hundreds of people came to the boy’s funeral and scolded government officials. He said failure to punish those responsible would only exacerbate the hatred that many residents harbor towards the government.
“We can’t imagine a person doing that to a teenager,” said Nazem. “We would prefer him to be shot and not murdered in this cruel way.”
David Zucchino reported from Kabul and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Najim Rahim contributed to the coverage from Kabul.
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