Young boys are seen moving awkwardly to the music with blank expressions on their faces. One of them even attempts a type of dance move, reminiscent of twerking in the West, but in this setting, it comes off as a sad imitation of what is popularized by celebrities like Beyonce. Watching them are men in traditional Afghan attire, observing closely, with one recording the scene on his phone.
What is coming next is as obvious to me as it must be to the boys. These men will rape them.
What is disturbing is that this scenario is not considered off-limits; in fact, it is culturally sanctioned, as evidenced by the footage that has made its way across social media platforms without much opposition.
Referred to as ‘Bacha bazi’ in Afghanistan, which translates to ‘boy play,’ this practice essentially involves influential individuals exploiting young boys, essentially turning them into objects of sexual servitude.
Their targets are typically pre-pubescent boys; they make them wear make-up. Sometimes poor families facing starvation sell their young sons to these wealthy men or have them ‘adopted’ for food and money.
The practice dates back to the 13th century, and has been a feature of life there ever since.
Afghanistan’s mujahideen warlords, who fought off the Soviet invasion and instigated a civil war in the 1980s, regularly engaged in acts of paedophilia.
One of the original provocations for the Taliban’s rise to power in the early 1990s was the terrorists’ outrage at this ‘traditional’ perversion. The Islamist group outlawed Bacha bazi – and the men who still engaged in it had to do so in secret.
Bachi bazi, which translates to ‘boy play’, is a practice in which powerful men turn children into sex slaves
Following the US’s departure from Afghanistan in 2021, the tribal custom is now endemic again
Ironically enough, following the 2001 US invasion and the toppling of the Taliban regime, many of these mujahideen warlords publicly restarted the systematic abuse and began buying, kidnapping, trafficking and raping young boys in earnest once again.
Following America’s departure from Afghanistan in 2021, it is now endemic again. As many as 50 per cent of the men in Pashtun tribal areas of the south are now thought to practise this paedophilic abuse.
Despite the Taliban’s outward scorn for Bacha bazi, a 2024 US State Department report found ‘a pattern of employing or recruiting child soldiers and pattern of sexual slavery’ by the group, who were also ‘in some cases perpetrators’.
I have heard several stories in recent years of Western journalists stumbling upon boys being raped in compound bathrooms, or local authorities suddenly refusing to engage when the subject is raised.
The practice is irretrievably linked to power.
Survivors have reported an ‘overwhelming understanding that Bacha bazi is committed by the powerful, including community leaders, and, in previous years, military commanders, police, and government officials’, according to a 2024 US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.
In 2024, the EU Agency for Asylum claimed: ‘Afghan security forces, in particular the Afghan Local Police, reportedly recruited boys specifically to use them for Bacha bazi in every province of the country.’
In the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, many children, desperate for money and employment, hang around truck stops, waiting for lifts to nearby cities where they hope to find work. Instead, they are often taken advantage of by truck drivers who exploit their vulnerability to use them as sex slaves.
A young Afghan boy is dressed by his ‘owner’ for a private party in 2008
Photographer Barat Ali Batoor documented Bacha bazi boys’ lives for months in a 2010 Frontline documentary
In a 2010 Frontline documentary on Bacha bazi made by PBS, Afghan reporter Najibullah Quraishi followed a man named Dastager, a former member of the Northern Alliance resistance forces that fought against the Soviets – and one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan’s Takhar province.
Asked what he looked for when selecting a boy, Dastager was confident in his tastes. ‘[He] should be attractive, good for dancing,’ he said. ‘Around 12 or 13, and good-looking. I tell their parents that I will train them.’
‘I’ll get a dancer to teach him dancing… We give the family money, and tell them that I’ll look after him. I’ll get him clothes and give him money. I pay for all his expenses. He doesn’t need to worry about anything.’
Dastager told the documentary that he had ‘taken in’ – that is, raped – more than 2,000 boys.
Quraishi was able to talk to a handful of them, some of whom had been groomed into thinking they were satisfied with their situation. One boy – Ahmad – then 17, revealed to Reuters in 2007: ‘I love my lord. I love to dance and act like a woman and play with my owner. Once I grow up, I will be an owner and I will have my own boys.’
The tragedy continues even after the abuse finally stops. When these boys grow facial hair, they are marked as pariahs, and their options limited to becoming prostitutes or pimps. Many, as a result, turn to drugs.
Photographer Barat Ali Batoor documented their lives for months for the Frontline documentary.
According to Batoor: ‘There was one particular boy I remember who was about 13 when I first met him, who was taken and used in the parties. He started taking heroin to help him cope, but he was still being taken to the parties. In the end he ran away, and he moved around a lot so they wouldn’t find him. He was begging on the streets of Kabul.’
According to journalist Christian Stephen, the victims of Bacha bazi not only face psychological trauma, but serious physical injuries including heavy internal bleeding, broken limbs, fractures, broken teeth, strangulation and, in some cases, death.
So why is this practice esteemed in a country where homosexuality attracts the death penalty?
Many Afghans allow social customs to trump religious values, partly because they speak Pashto – and can’t read the Quran as it is written in Arabic. But in the end, it comes down to two things. First is that perennial trait: hypocrisy.
Many mujahideen commanders waging ‘holy’ war have used Islam to mobilise thousands of men – while simultaneously sexually abusing boys and remaining relatively secular themselves.
The second factor is that in some conservative religious groups, Bacha bazi is considered acceptable. According to a 2009 study by the Human Terrain Team, a support group for the US army, Pashtun social norms dictate that Bacha bazi is not un-Islamic or homosexual at all.
If the man does not love the boy, the sexual act is not reprehensible, and is far more ethical than raping a woman.
Also, since the men penetrate the boys, it is seen as more ‘masculine’, and not a homosexual act.
Western troops fighting the Taliban during the past two decades reported how senior Afghan allies have tried to conceal how widespread Bacha bazi was.
Following the death of American marine Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr in 2021, his father, Gregory Sr revealed that his son told him that from his bunk in southern Afghanistan he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the military base.
‘At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,’ the marine’s father recalled his son telling him. ‘My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their “culture”,’ he told the New York Times.
At the same time, the Taliban was recruiting hundreds of child prostitutes to work on military bases where Afghans were working for the Americans – then murdering the soldiers who abused them.
Pimped to the Taliban by local tribes, the young boys infiltrated bases to work as dancers and prostitutes. Once inside they poisoned or shot their abusers, or drugged the guards and opened the gates to Taliban fighters lying in wait. Dozens of soldiers and policemen were killed this way over a period of several months in 2016: in the southern province of Urozgan, these honeytrap attacks were so effective that hundreds of policemen and officers were sacked.
‘The Taliban have figured out the biggest weakness of the police and sent about 100 beardless boys to penetrate checkpoints and poison and kill policemen,’ Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewani, Urozgan’s former police chief, said at the time.
In February 2018, Afghanistan finally introduced a new penal code that contained specific provisions to punish those involved in Bacha bazi.
But since America’s botched withdrawal under Joe Biden four years ago, it is pervasive again.
In part, it’s a symptom of the broader lawlessness that now exists in the country.
Like so many other barbaric practices, the sexual exploitation and slavery of these boys has become a perverse status symbol for many Afghan leaders.
Tight gender segregation in Afghan society and lack of contact with women has contributed to the spread of Bacha bazi.
After the Taliban’s takeover, they gave the impression they would be more progressive – promising to uphold the rights of girls – within the limits of Islamic law of course.
What followed this was quite the opposite: a litany of the most sadistic and brainless anti-women persecution.
Last year, the Taliban passed a law that gave the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Ministry – the Taliban’s morality police – sweeping powers to enforce a stringent code of conduct for Afghan citizens and curtail the rights of women.
This same law also banned the practice of Bacha bazi. And yet young boys today continue to be abused – a problem exacerbated by the unavailability of women under the Taliban’s oppressive regime.
Much of this insanity stems from the particularly hardline stance of the Taliban’s Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.
Akhundzada is a man who stays out of the public eye. Few photos of him exist, and his public output is limited to the odd audio recording.
He was an Islamic judge of the Sharia courts under the 1996-2001 Taliban government where one can only imagine the type of legislative savagery he would have meted out pretty much every day. He opposes most forms of female education, favours much tighter media control and is said to hanker after a return to the Taliban’s halcyon days under Osama bin Laden’s colleague and the group’s founder, Mullah Omar.
When I recently asked an Afghan expert why Akhundzada was so extreme, even to the point where he has repeatedly clashed with less fanatical Taliban leaders in Kabul, I was told: ‘Because he’s a warlord who lives in a cave.’
This is where we are almost 25 years on from the invasion of Afghanistan. With trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded.
We may have left the country, but our legacy remains, not least among sexually abused boys of Afghanistan, who we have abandoned to this relentless and unforgivable barbarism.
