Afghan Educator Basir Arian Recounts Severe safety case by Taliban Forces
“I knew that sooner or later, they would come for me,” says Basir Arian. After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, he established an online English study program for young women and girls who had been banned from attending secondary schools and universities across the nation. He recognized that organizing secret education under an authoritarian regime carried immense personal risk, but felt compelled to act after seeing his own sister stripped of her right to learn. They could barely see a metre in front of their faces, the wind carried dust – some days.
The Summoning to Taliban Intelligence
In May 2022, while eating lunch in the western Afghan city of Herat, Arian received a phone call from an unfamiliar local number. On the line, a Taliban official commanded him to report to the provincial intelligence directorate within twenty minutes, explicitly ordering him to bring his mobile phone along for inspection. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Arian recalls. “If you disobey this order, they will kill you. You have to try not to make them angry.” Knowing the grave consequences of refusal, he hurriedly informed a close friend of his destination and arranged a emergency contact plan before departing. A Talib official told Arian to come to the intelligence directorate within 20 minutes and to bring his phone. According to they spoke in Pashto: “His excellency, We must teach him a lesson.
Upon arriving at the security complex, Taliban guards searched him at the entrance gate before directing him inside. The facility’s large central courtyard was filled with heavy military vehicles, flanked by armed Taliban fighters patrolling the grounds. Arian was instructed to sit quietly in an interrogation hallway, where he was left waiting anxiously for several hours under heavy guard. Armed Taliban with long beards and dusty slippers were everywhere; even the men sitting behind desks had guns.
Interrogation and Brutal Assault
Eventually, a tall, bald young Taliban operative summoned Arian into an official’s room. Inside, a senior commander played a intercepted WhatsApp voice message in which Arian had spoken to his female students, encouraging them not to give up hope and urging them to stay motivated despite official bans. The commander aggressively accused Arian of collaborating with foreign infidels, acting as a western puppet, and committing apostasy. Turning to the younger guard, the official ordered, “Let’s teach him.”
The tall fighter blindfolded Arian, bound his hands tightly behind his back, and forced him down two flights of stairs into a dark basement room. In the subterranean cell, multiple interrogators subjected him to intense verbal abuse and violent physical torture. They repeatedly shouted insults, calling him an infidel and a dog while beating him unconscious.
Severe Injuries and Forced Confession
When Arian regained consciousness, he found himself lying in a pool of his own blood on the cold floor. His body was severely bruised, one of his fingers was fractured, and his nose and jaw were crushed. After pleading with his captors to remove his blindfold so he could breathe through his mouth, he was held overnight in the cold subterranean cell. Something hard struck his nose and jaw – he realised it was the butt of a rifle – and he was kicked until he lost consciousness. Which a different man did, he asked to have his blindfold removed and his hands untied.
The following morning, captors blindfolded Arian again and dragged him back to the senior official’s upstairs office. There, under threat of further violence, he was forced to sign and fingerprint a written statement declaring repentance for his actions and promising never to organize illegal educational activities again. Upon his release, medical X-rays revealed that his nose had been fractured in four places alongside a major jaw fracture, requiring surgeons to wait several weeks for facial swelling to subside before performing reconstructive surgery. According to every few weeks a schoolmate gathering firewood or a mother fetching water would step on a mine and lose a leg or an arm, or sometimes,, Arian: “There was nothing left to save.”.
Early Life and Overcoming Adversity
Arian was born in 1997 in a remote village in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, growing up in a region historically devastated by the 1979 Soviet invasion and subsequent civil wars. He vividly remembers attending his village’s very first temporary school in 2003, where lessons were conducted inside primitive canvas tents provided by foreign aid agencies amidst harsh desert winds, blinding dust storms, and surrounding unexploded landmines. In rural Afghanistan, near the border with Iran, into a community already broken by the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the civil war that erupted after it left in 1989, a rian was born in 1997. On the day it opened in 2003, he remembers the excitement of walking with his cousins to the village’s first school. Just tents, which – like the books, pencils, even the biscuits they were given at break – were all provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund, there were no buildings. The family moved so that his siblings and cousins could keep studying as well.
Despite severe economic hardship, Arian’s family valued education deeply; his father regularly ordered books from Iran or brought them home from nearby cities. Reading classic literature like Robinson Crusoe and The Little Prince fueled Arian’s passion for learning. In 2012, he relocated to Herat to pursue secondary education in a formal classroom setting before entering university, where he took up physical training and intensive reading to cope with regional instability. According to his father – a tailor – had a talent for maths, but only had a few years of primary education and wanted something better for his son. “My dreams began because of my father’s belief in me,”, Arian. For the first time, Arian saw a rose that someone had brought from the city, when he was about 10. And Arian walked for miles with his father and their donkey to fetch it, drinking water came from a spring. By the time he was 15, Arian was the only student left in his class. When he started university, Arian was skinny and fragile, and he began going to the gym. “The gym was my therapy,” he says. Desks and chairs, and better trained teachers, but he worried about being teased for his country accent, his new classroom had walls. To try to understand the situation in his country, he read hungrily.
Rebuilding Efforts and Escape
After graduating from university in 2017, Arian dedicated himself to public service and community development. In 2018, while traveling in Kabul to seek employment, he narrowly survived a devastating suicide bombing that exploded near his taxi. By 2019, his leadership earned him election as a youth representative to the Loya Jirga, a traditional council of elder leaders convened during national crises. He later enrolled in a master’s program in urban planning in neighboring Iran to address growing displacement driven by armed conflict and regional climate severe droughts. In 2017, he graduated and was keen to help rebuild the country.
Following his horrific ordeal in Taliban custody and subsequent medical treatment, Arian realized it was impossible to remain safely in Afghanistan. He managed to escape across the border into Iran, where he lived precariously without work authorization while enduring persistent chronic pain and deep trauma. He eventually secured political asylum in Europe, embarking on a long journey to rebuild his life from scratch. Which were “hostile towards women”, he noticed newer versions of “political Islam”.
Reflections on Dignity and Human Connection
Reflecting on his experiences as a refugee and survivor of state violence, Arian rejects popular cliches that traumatic suffering inherently makes a person stronger, emphasizing instead that severe abuse takes away vital parts of one’s health and sense of security. He advocates strongly for the rights of displaced people globally, pointing out that political figures and media outlets frequently scapegoat defenseless migrants for complex societal issues. But wants people to know what happened, he finds it very hard to talk about this part. Although people kept trying, there was not enough rainfall to grow much. And started to get threats from various religious groups. “I was not alone,” he says, but “part of a network of brave men and women.”, he became well known locally.
Today, Arian focuses on healing by refusing to let past horrors define his future. He emphasizes that small, everyday acts of kindness and human connection are essential for displaced individuals trying to navigate new cultures. His core message to fellow refugees around the world is to steadfastly hold on to their fundamental human dignity, proving that it is possible to emerge resiliently from even the darkest circumstances.
