Kiana Hayeri

Visual Storyteller

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The exhibit installed at Photoville 2020 provides an early glimpse of my upcoming project, Promises Written On The Ice, Left In The Sun, for which I received the 2020 Visionary Award, from the Tim Hetherington Trust.

In 2019, I visited Herat Women’s Prison for The New York Times Magazine. "They Killed Their Husbands, Now in Prison, They Feel Free" stands in stark contrast to the essentializing portraits of the women in blue burqas common in Western news coverage of Afghanistan. While violence against women is rampant in Afghanistan, for some women, murdering their husbands was the only way they could escape their abusive marriages. 18 months later, exclusively for this exhibit, I traced the women I photographed in the prison, to find out what happened to them after they appeared in media. The outcome was unexpected and surprising.

Some of these inmates have since been freed after President Ashraf Ghani ordered the release of thousands of prisoners — mostly women, juveniles and sick people — to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Eligible inmates were notified to pack their belongings and wait in the courtyard, listening as a few names were called out. Those lucky prisoners were released, but after hours of waiting, Aalia Azizi, the prison manager, told the remaining women the bad news: “No one else is going home today, there has been a mistake.” Azizi didn’t know what the mistake was, only that she had clear instructions not to release anyone else.

The next day, the prison erupted into chaos. A group of angry inmates tried to smash through the bulletproof entrance gate and shatter the prison’s windows. The children’s playground was burned down, and a dozen inmates were hospitalized, some with serious injuries after swallowing broken glass as an act of protest. They had been promised freedom, and they were refusing to give it up. The violent demonstrations continued, and the prison, which was previously a relatively safe and peaceful sanctuary compared with the homes many inmates came from, fell into discord. Some prisoners went on hunger strikes, and others attempted suicide, all demanding their release. Eventually, the government offered a solution: If the women wanted to leave, they could buy off the remainder of their sentence with approval from the prosecutor’s office.

Here are the tales of some of the main characters, 7 months after that riot that set many free. [LAST UPDATED ON: SEPTEMBER 18, 2020]

For the final multimedia project, to be released for the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, I will be mapping media coverage of women in Afghanistan, using the techniques of conventional journalism, and the mechanisms of advanced search engines and adaptive codes, to identify and trace the histories of women who have received public attention, once they have been profiled in the media. Collaborating with local journalists, I will trace the stories of these women’s lives since their moment in the spotlight, and she will share their experiences on an interactive website, revealing the strength of the participants, and the dangers of dilettante hit & run journalism.

Foroozan was in the 10th grade when her family arranged for her to marry a man who was 25 years older. He was prone to violence, and for 15 years, she endured his physical and verbal abuse. “He never allowed me to go outside,” she says. “In the 15 years of our marriage, I didn’t leave my house more than 15 times.” For years, Foroozan took the beatings in stride, until one early morning she saw her husband attempting to molest one of their daughters, who was fast asleep in the other room. Foroozan grabbed a shovel and hit him repeatedly with the blade until he died.

When she turned herself into the police, her 12-year-old son, Maqsood, stepped forward, saying that he had helped his mother with the killing. Foroozan was charged and found guilty of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Maqsood was sent to a juvenile rehabilitation center for two and a half years, and his sisters, Mozhdah and Mahtab, 9 and 7 at the time, were sent to a safe house.

The last of Foroozan’s savings went to pay a smuggler to get Maqsood out of the country after he was released from detention three years ago. He is currently in Germany, where he traveled by foot at just 14 years old after being released. In January, his asylum request was rejected by German authorities. His lawyer has appealed the case, but he could be deported back to Afghanistan when he turns 18 this year.

Foroozan was one of the lucky ones who managed to get out of the prison by buying off the remainder of her sentence. We featured her in this follow up story for The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/magazine/afghan-women-prison-coronavirus.html

“Thanks to coronavirus, I am given a second chance to live,” Foroozan said. “To get out of the prison early and start a new life with my daughters at my side.” Mozhdah and Mahtab, who are now 15 and 13, described the last two months as the toughest period in all the years they were apart from their mother. “During the quarantine we were allowed only one phone call per month,” Mahtab said. “We couldn’t go to school, we couldn’t come home to our grandma and we couldn’t visit our mom. They had imprisoned us as well.” She cried as she spoke. 

After the follow-up story was published on NYT, the support for her and her daughters was overwhelming. A fundraising was set up for them and a large sum was collected. With that money, Foroozan paid off all of her debts, enrolled the girls in English classes and will be sending them to a private school once they reopen post-pandemic. She was reached in her small apartment above her mother’s house in Herat. She has started sewing again and is getting a lot of old clients back as well as some new ones. Foroozan proudly said that she is taking driving classes. She has already passed her written test and needs to spend more time behind the wheel before taking her road test.

The publication of her story on NYT along with her unique character and inspiring story, led Foroozan to an exclusive audiobook with Audible, which she is being very well compensated for. She is hoping that one day, the family can join her son in Germany.

As a 12-year-old girl, Nafas (20), was promised to a drug-addicted relative as his second wife, a man 17 years older. Before they married, he beat her. One time he stabbed her with a knife, leaving her with scars on her lower back. She protested the union for a year, appealing to her parents and brothers. “Even if you die, you have to marry him,” they told her. When they wouldn’t relent, Nafas took her brother’s gun and shot her husband. He died from the wound. “I had to do it,” Nafas says.

She wasn’t even 15 when she asked for a divorce but was told by her parents that “a woman goes to her husband’s house wearing white and leaves his house in white” referring to bridal dress and the white shroud that muslims use as a burial sheet. “Fine” she said, “I will live with him till the day I die”

Fed up with the abuse she was putting up with, even living at her parental house, one-day Nafas went to her brother’s room and picked up the gun and call her husband to come. “One bullet, one bullet in his abdominal took his life.”

Nafas was initially sentenced to death, and in the second court appeal it was reduced to 16 years. “His first wife came forward in the courthouse and thanked me for saving her life and her children.”

The photo of Nafas babysitting the child of one of the prison’s guard, appeared in many publications after it was first published on NYTM. It caught the attention of an Afghan-American lawyer who runs an NGO inside Afghanistan, offering legal aid to women in need. She has been assigned a new lawyer who is currently fighting for Nafas early release from prison. Meanwhile, she is still serving the remainder of her sentence, about 10 more years.

Parisa (20) arrived at the prison in 2018. She was married for about five years, during which time she was repeatedly beaten and stabbed by her husband, who was a Taliban fighter. He would tie her up and beat her hands and feet with a thick piece of wood. At one point, she said, he even tried to sell her kidney, going as far as finding a buyer and then taking her to the hospital to get a blood test. “When they determined that my kidney was not a match, he beat me,” she said. Her husband threatened to kill her parents if she filed for a divorce. “I would pray for my death,” she said. “I would say, ‘God, either kill me or him.’ ”

Parisa’s husband tried to shoot her on two different occasions. “He was sitting right in front of me,” she says. “He aimed at me and fired, but the bullet missed me. He would say he was teaching me. On another occasion he opened fire, but by order of God, the gun fell off his hand and the bullet fired in the air.”

Parisa went to her in-laws for protection, but they had little influence over their son. One night, she locked herself in a room in which she found her husband’s rifle and loaded it. She says she fired a shot through the door after her husband started screaming on the other side. The bullet struck him in the chest, and he died minutes later. 

Police took Parisa into custody, and after a brief investigation, she was tried, convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Her 1-year-old daughter, Fatima, and her 3-year-old son, Mohammad Irfan, were incarcerated with her. “I accept this imprisonment,” Parisa says. “I was not able to live another day with him, so this is what happened to me.” One weekend Parisa let her in-laws take Mohammad Irfan for a visit and then they refused to give him back. Parisa petitioned the government and her son was eventually returned to her in prison.

When the order came in that female inmates may qualify to buy off the remainder of their sentence, Parisa managed to fund the money that was needed. When her in-laws found out about this, they threatened to kill her and take her children in, ‘the moment she steps foot outside of the prison.’ Parisa kept the money and chose to remain inside the prison, where she ironically feels more free.

Leilimah (37) and her twin sister, shared the same room and wore matching outfits most days. The twins barely ever left their room which was furnished with two sets of bunker beds and hosted a selected group of inmates for tea and sweets. The sisters, from Gharian district of Herat, were both accused of murdering their husbands. The sister, who chose to remain anonymous but was ok with being photographed, says she was wrongfully accused of murdering her husband but Lailima has accepted the charges. 

Leilimah’s husband, an unemployed and abusive man, used to force her into prostitution and beat her up when and if she refused to give in. He sold off their oldest daughter, Farigol, at the age of 7, to a man that they had never met and was an illegal migrant working in Iran. They day Lailima lost her patience and stabbed her husband to death was the day he brought a man home to prostitute Farigol out who was 10 at the time. She was initially sentenced to death but on her second court appeal it was reduced to 20 years in prison.

Her daughter is still married to the illegal migrant in Iran and is taking care of all of her siblings. “The other night, I called my daughter in Iran, asked her if she has forgiven me for killing her father. If she would still love me when I get out of the prison. She said, he was never a father to us. thanked me for pulling them and myself out of that miserable life”

Leilimah’s story was eventually edited out of the final publication but her story remains with me. Both Leilimah and her sister, have stayed inside the prison, even after they were given a chance to buy off the remainder of their sentence.

When I met Nahid (35), she spent most of her time on her bunk, alone, watching television and smoking cigarettes. She was married for 15 years to a heroin addict who beat her regularly, stabbed her on a few occasions and shot her once. Nahid was the sole breadwinner to the family all those years and had been incarcerated multiple time before, for felonies such as robbery. 

Her arms are covered with cuts that appear self-inflicted. “I am regretful despite how he tortured me,” she told me through tears. “I wouldn’t have done this if he had gotten better. He was the father of my children.” But he also abused their children. “I knew he was going to seriously harm me or my children at some point,” Nahid says. “One day when we were fighting, it got out of hand, and I shot him.”

I spoke to Nahid’s older daughter, Parwana (17). Nahid is still inside the prison and has got a few more years to serve. Parwana wasn’t sure why her mother did not qualify to pay the fine and get out. However Aalia Azizi, Herat’s Women Prison Manager, believe Nahid didn’t qualitfy for early release because of her previous record and that she had been incarcerated multiple times before.

When I met Nargis (25), she had been incarcerated for over 1.5 years. A mother to 7-year-old Mujib and 5-year-old Maria, Nargis was a unique inmate in Herat Prison. She was well-educated, had relatives living in the west and understood how the legal system worked and where her case was standing.

Nargis was only 4 when her family married her off to her second cousin, Abdul Gharib. Both families waited until they were was old enough, before Nargis was sent off to her husband's house. She was only 17.

Over the years, Abdul Gharib, who was a police officer at the time and later became a commander, made life miserable for Nargis and refused to divorce her when she requested it multiple times. Instead, he threatened her every time that he would get a second wife if she stops obeying him.

Nargis still managed to continue her studies and became a nurse and midwife and worked at a hospital. Eventually, Abdul Gharib married a village woman as his second wife and sold off/gifted their daughter, 3.5 years old at the time, to the 7-year-old son of the bride’s brother. “My own life flashed in front of my eyes,” she said. “That’s when I lost it and planned to murder him.”
Since Nargis was a nurse herself, she had access to medications and knew how to use it. One day he wasn’t feeling well, she took his blood pressure and told him an IV will sort him out. She medicated him with something that she knew will cause an extreme allergic reaction. Abdul Gharib died from suffocation.

After his death, Nargis felt guilty and immediately confessed to her crime. Her parents, ashamed of the disgrace, disowned her and refused to see her ever since she admitted herself to the prison. Her brother visited her 2 times in 1.5 years. On the contrary, her brother-in-law, another police officer supported her and helped Nargis to get a pardon to reduce her sentence. Her children, who were staying in a safe house/orphanage associated with the prison, visited her on alternative weekends.

Nargis’ story was edited out of the final piece for NYTM, due to lack of good visuals. 7 months after the initial publication of the story, she was reached on her phone, outside of the prison. After the riot broke out in Herat Prison at the height of the coronavirus outbreak and inmates were given a chance to buy off the remainder of their sentence, Nargis managed to put up the money needed and got out. She collected Mujib and Maria from the safe house and went home. Since her release, she has married the man she always loved and as of mid-September, she is 3 months pregnant with her new husband.

Her in-laws from her first husband have protested her right to keep Mujib and Maria, as Sharia law requires Nargis to give up her children to the in-laws as she has remarried to someone outside of their family.

Nargis is currently fighting her case in court to keep the children. Maria is with Nargis while Mujib was forcefully taken away from her by her mother-in-law.

Fatema (39) was only a child when she was forced to marry her cousin, bearing him five children, the first when she was 13. Her husband was an addict and a violent man, prone to punching Fatima in the head; once, he even shot her. He used to beat her so severely and frequently that he left her with a traumatic brain injury. She experiences chronic pain from the physical abuse.

“Even your bones cannot leave this house,” he would say when she begged him to stop. On several occasions, she tried to kill herself in halfhearted ways, eating food that had gone bad or exposing herself to cold weather hoping that ‘death would free her from that miserable life’. In the end, she choked him to death in his sleep. The court sentenced her to 20 years in prison. She has already served eight. He used to beat her repeatedly in her head, so frequently and severely that it has left her with a traumatic brain injury. She experiences chronic pain from the physical abuse, and often receives help from younger inmates who offer her to wash her clothes.

Fatema could not be reached directly on the phone, but another inmate and the prison manager both confirmed that she is still incarcerated, even though she qualified to buy off the remainder of her sentence.