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From Anarchist Front
May 18, 2026

Here, in the 17th district of Kabul, two girls' bodies are wrapped in white cloth. The whiteness of the shroud, this time not of ritual, but the signature of a predatory regime on bodies that had been plundered many times before their deaths. They were not killed to punish; they were killed to register ownership, to mark the boundaries of property. In the Taliban's logic, a woman who does not submit to forced marriage, a woman who was previously in the clutches of a willing or unwilling spouse and now the armed Taliban wants her for themselves, a woman whose existence, in the eyes of this armed group, is an ownerless land, is to be eliminated. Targeted and desert killings are the words that the spontaneous protesting women have chosen for this situation: executions without trial, without documents, in a corner of the countryside or plain, where the soil is a witness and the Taliban government is the absolute owner of life and body.

Now, from Kabul to Kandahar, the caravan of silence is moving. Girls whose names we must not know are forcibly taken from their homes to be married in another city to men whose only identity cards are their guns. What is this marriage but a collective ownership document? The Taliban are not only a state, but also an institution for distributing human spoils. In this system, women are spoils that are divided among the faithful; a share of meat, service, and silence, called marriage. Here, even the false literature of the Islamic law of concubinage no longer applies; a woman who has a husband is married to a Taliban by force of a gun, meaning that beyond all jurisprudential texts, only one law is recognized: the law of armed desire. And when armed desire becomes law, killing a woman who does not give in to this desire is not called murder, but the enforcement of order.

Anarchism begins precisely from this point: the negation of any order that is based on the ownership of body and soul. The Taliban are not a state in the classical modern sense that does evil; they are the naked manifestation of the same violence that every state hides within its institutions. Borders, passports, civil registration, official marriage, family courts; all of these are civilized forms of the same rod that has landed in Afghanistan today without a covering. Forced marriage is not the only primitive form of contract; it is the same relationship of domination that everywhere, with the signature of a notary or the seal of a mullah, turns a woman into a commodity. Here, however, the notary has taken up arms and the seal is blood. And what does the United Nations, this supreme council of world governments, do in the face of this nakedness of domination? Silence. A silence that is not due to impotence, but due to structural complicity. Because the global system of states cannot lose its legitimacy by condemning a de facto state. The Taliban is the de facto representative of a territory that the United Nations recognizes as a state. In the logic of this order, every state has the right to rule over its citizens, even if that rule manifests itself in the form of organized aggression and random killings. This is not treason; this is the main function of the world order: to guarantee states’ right to own bodies, and to label their crimes as internal matters.

But the women who have taken to the streets, that spontaneous movement, are moving against this order. Spontaneous means without a license, without a headquarters, without a leader to negotiate in Brussels or Geneva. This spontaneity is a deeply anarchist trait: an action that does not draw its legitimacy from any institution, that rises from the midst of shattered lives and cries out: end the culture of impunity. They do not ask human rights institutions to help, but rather tell them that your silence is a betrayal of human ideals; that is, they are severing the invisible thread that connects human rights defenders to the very apparatus of states. These women are saying in effect: we are the ideal of humanity itself, you are either with us or with our murderers. And this means wresting the politics of liberation from the clutches of technocrats.

The story of the two girls found in District 17 of Kabul is not an exception; it is the logical conclusion of the formula: state + patriarchy + absolute ownership. When a woman is defined as nothing more than a controlled womb and a captive body, not killing her is not a matter of morality, but of economic economy. If the Taliban decide that this married woman, having once been someone else’s property, is no longer worth confiscating, then a bullet is the cheapest way to erase the issue. And therein lies the dark irony: the same family structure that held women captive in Afghanistan before the Taliban is now betraying them. The family that raised the girl in the hope that her husband would be a reasonable owner now watches as a new owner, with sheer violence, signs the deed in his own name.

This is a crisis of all property-based institutions; a crisis in which only the hierarchy changes, but the essence of the human being as property remains.

So the way out is not to reform the Taliban. Nor is the way out a return to that seemingly more peaceful past; a past in which women were perhaps not killed, but traded. Anarchism insists that the only answer to this hell is the complete dismantling of the master-slave relationship that has been called the state, institutional religion, the family, and forced marriage. No international court is going to restore the sanctity of our bodies to us, because these courts themselves are built on the ruins of a lost sanctity. No resolution will drive the desert killer from the field, because the desert killer in the mirror is as powerful as the signer of the resolution in New York. The only thing that can tip the scales of terror is the movement without borders of those who refuse to let their bodies be the battlefield of any armed power. A movement that brings together workers, women, peasants, and all the dispossessed of this world on a single horizon: the horizon of the destruction of everything that bends the stature of man, whether by gun, marriage certificate, or the seal of the Security Council.

The white shrouds in Kabul’s 17th district are not just corpses; they are silent statements of a truth we do not want to see. That innocent whiteness is a flag raised over the ruins of a civilization that has long demanded that women be the sacred sacrifice of order. We raise this flag with our own hands, not to mourn, but to declare rebellion. A rebellion that knows that neither the Taliban nor the former republic nor the United Nations nor anyone else will grant liberation. Liberation is this spontaneous act of breaking the chains at this very moment, as a fearless woman shouts: I belong to no state, no tribe, no man. And this is not me, the explosive core of every true anarchism that does not remain silent in the face of the marriage machine, the shroud, and the bullet.

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