None of us will be ignorant to what is happening in Afghanistan right now as the Taliban take over and are set to impose Sharia Law on a people that have been living in relative freedom for the past 20 years.
We are certainly not here to debate the politics of the withdrawal, a plan put into place by Donald Trump and then followed through by President Biden. While everyone plays the blame game and discusses (quite rightly) what is going to happen to the rights of women, there is a deafening silence when it comes to the abject danger the Afghan LGBT community is now in.
The journalist Patrick Strudwick has written a chilling piece about it which you can read here but in it he describes how under Sharia Law “There are only two penalties for gays: either stoning or he has to stand behind a wall that falls on him. The wall must be 2.5 to 3 metres high.”
We write a hell of a lot about the safety of LGBTQI+ people around the world on this site but this is something that is happening RIGHT NOW and within days gay people could be rounded up and murdered without impunity. The Taliban have said people can go about their normal lives but how can that be if their lives are in direct opposition to the rule of Sharia Law?
We need to speak about LGBT Afghans on social media, to our local governments to enable them to seek asylum. They are in a race against time and something HAS to be done to help them.