For years, the Taliban repeatedly denied torturing or humiliating prisoners in their detention facilities. An audio document obtained by the Hasht-e Subh Daily challenges those claims. In the recording, a local Taliban official openly confirms that Taliban intelligence tortures detainees and carries out arbitrary arrests. The document reveals that many people are detained and abused without any formal charges, often because of internal plots and rivalries within the group. At the same time, local officials voice anger over the arrest of several foreign fighters and say they feel deeply disillusioned with the current regime. They also criticize Taliban clerics who serve as judges and muftis, saying that while they fought on the battlefield, salaries and privileges now go to clerics who arrived from Pakistan. The report shows that many local Taliban feel alienated by ethnic discrimination and by financial and intelligence abuses inside the system.
Sources say these internal divisions are spreading in Badakhshan and several other provinces. The Hasht-e Subh Daily obtained the audio recording from a local Taliban official in the northeast, where criticism of Taliban intelligence is blunt and unfiltered.
In the recording, the official says that Taliban intelligence arrests, tortures, and insults people without any legal basis, sometimes leaving them barely alive. He explains that intelligence agents often target individuals after being pushed by rival factions within the group, then subject them to brutal abuse.
The speaker appears especially outraged by the arrest of a foreign fighter. He claims that, except for Hibatullah Akhundzada, no one in Afghanistan is as devout or as committed to reading the Quran as the detained man.
The official says, “Intelligence should be the eyes and ears of society. It should not arrest people unjustly because of someone else’s malice, beat them until they are half-dead, or strike them with sticks. When someone files a complaint, intelligence must investigate properly.” He then explains that the foreign fighter had joined the group for what he believed was jihad, yet Taliban intelligence arrested him anyway.
The local Taliban continues, “We do not protect the dignity of a migrant. Instead, we raid his home and drag him away. He migrated for the sake of God. Are we allowed to detain him? Are these intelligence fighters more devout than us? Every useless person signs up with intelligence and calls himself an officer. Go away, take your intelligence with you. You have shamed us everywhere by arresting people and beating them.”
He then compares the current practices of Taliban intelligence to the intelligence services during the era of Afghanistan’s two-party communist parties and Dr. Najibullah. He says, “Back then, they poured hot oil on people’s heads. They were communists. What became of them? We should not repeat those crimes. They must be told to stop hurting people.”
The criticism grows sharper as he adds, “There are two institutions in this system that I truly despise. We spent our lives in the trenches, gasping for breath, moving from one mountain to another. Now two parasitic clerics arrive from Pakistan and call themselves honorable judges. I ask one of them, How much is your salary? He says eighty thousand afghanis. I ask [another one] who he is. He says he is a mufti. I asked what he did before. He says he campaigned for former MPs [he names some former government members of parliament]. Until yesterday, you walked with those MPs, and now you take a huge salary from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan?”
He ends his remarks by saying, “By God, I am a dissatisfied member of the Emirate. I grew up at its table. If you find someone more dissatisfied than me, then we will see. Every day, I witness countless tricks and abuses committed by this cleric.”
These statements expose patterns of torture in Taliban prisons that the Hasht-e Subh Daily has documented in earlier reports. Those investigations found that the Taliban routinely subjects opponents and critics to extreme abuse. One investigative report on women protesters who were later released shows that Taliban members forced them to confess while naked.
Former detainees describe being hung by their feet, having plastic bags pulled over their heads, having their hands tied behind their backs, and being locked in damp rooms. Guards beat them with belts, press Kalashnikov barrels near their ears, threaten them with death, and sometimes urinate on their faces.
They also endure constant verbal abuse. Guards insult them with obscene language, accuse them of being American servants or spies, and threaten to harm their families.
Internal divisions now reach beyond the lower ranks. Senior Taliban figures have begun airing their disagreements in public. Earlier, the Taliban’s interior minister criticized what he called a government based on fear and intimidation. He admitted that there is no tolerance and that people are condemned and humiliated.
After these remarks by the interior minister and the leader of the Haqqani network, who is responsible for the last 20 years’ deadly and terrorist attacks, national television under Taliban control aired an audio recording of a speech by Neda Mohammad Nadeem, the Taliban minister of higher education. In that speech, he warned members not to oppose Hibatullah Akhundzada and stressed that the system recognizes only one emir who must be obeyed.
Earlier findings by the Hasht-e Subh Daily also showed that the Taliban relocated Pashtun fighters to border areas near Tajikistan, while removing local fighters from their posts or sending them to distant parts of the country.
You can read the Persian version of this report here:
اعتراف به بازداشتهای خودسرانه و شکنجه؛ نارضایتی داخلی از استخبارات طالبان تشدید شده
