He cannot escape the memory of the knife. He holds his hand up and shows me the scar on the underside of his arm, just below the wrist. ‘I resisted,’ he explains, ‘so they forced me.’
Mustafa looks bereft as he recounts the first time he was abused. He was 14 years old.
‘My friends told me to come to a garden where we would eat fruit and drink nice juices,’ he tells me. ‘When I arrived seven men were waiting. I tried to resist. I shouted and screamed but they tied my hands and legs.
'Then they used the knife on me and everything went black. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up hours later in the desert. That was the first time.’
‘My friends were not good people,’ he adds quietly. ‘They merely wore the mask of friends.’
Mustafa is a victim of bacha bazi (‘boy play’), a form of sexual exploitation of boys common to Pashtun communities across Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The practice is ancient, possibly stretching back to Alexander the Great’s invasion of the region in 330 BCE. The victims, generally young boys, are made to dress in feminine clothing and dance at gatherings for leering adult men; then they are subjected to coercion, trafficking and sexual abuse.
There are those in the West who, with slippery moral relativism, describe it as a mere ‘cultural practice’. But this is bogus. Bacha bazi is child rape. And in an Afghanistan long beset by poverty and violence, the practice is endemic.
Victims of bacha bazi, generally young boys, are made to dress in feminine clothing and dance at gatherings for leering adult men; then they are subjected to coercion, trafficking and sexual abuse
Officially, the Taliban prohibit the practice but a 2023 US State Department report described a ‘pattern of sexual slavery by the Taliban’, finding that bacha bazi incidents had increased
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Before the Taliban’s return, bacha bazi was described by US authorities as ‘pervasive nationwide’ in Afghanistan.
In 2020 alone, Afghan authorities reported 237 cases referred for prosecution and 185 under police investigation, while a 2014 Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission inquiry interviewed 36 men who practised bacha bazi, 89 per cent of whom said they had never been brought before the courts.
In 2019, activists spent six months interviewing hundreds of boys aged 14 to 20 and uncovered evidence that at least 165 had been sexually abused across three public high schools.
At least five boys were reportedly murdered in so-called ‘honour’ killings by their families after videos of their abuse became public.
I’ve come to Afghanistan to report on life after five years of Taliban rule and to investigate whether bacha bazi has ‘disappeared’, as the government claims.
Today of course, Kabul is under total Taliban control. Talibs stalk the streets clutching US weapons (a legacy of their defeat of the coalition forces who occupied the country for 20 years), and the ‘virtue and vice’ police patrol with fastidious brutality.
But try to discuss bacha bazi with anyone and the mood instantly darkens. Even my local fixer refuses to touch the subject.
‘You don’t want to ask about that,’ says one local. ‘The Taliban won’t like it. And anyway, they stopped it all.’
Officially, the Taliban prohibit the practice but a 2023 US State Department report described a ‘pattern of sexual slavery by the Taliban’, finding that bacha bazi incidents had increased.
However, in 2024 Taliban authorities reported zero trafficking investigations, prosecutions or convictions, leaving the true scale of the abuse largely hidden.
Finally, through intermediaries, I find Mustafa. I speak to him via video call from an old warehouse in the city centre. It has steel doors so if the Taliban come, I have enough time to escape through another exit before they gain entry. His face is partially covered by a black mask. He is illiterate and comes from a poor family in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city. His eyes are tired and his expression forlorn; his hair is black and straight.
As we speak he becomes understandably distressed. After his friends lured him to the garden that day, he says he was left traumatised and unable to leave the house: ‘My family asked me, “Why don’t you go to work?” And I didn’t have any explanation.’
Eventually, as the family breadwinner – though still a teenager – he had no choice but to return to a menial job he has asked me not to describe.
But his problems had only just begun. In Mustafa’s community, everybody knows each other’s business. He already had the reputation of being a very pretty child and of being an excellent dancer.
Now, after his experience in the garden, the word was out: he was a bacha bazi boy.
According to Zahra Joya, editor in chief of Rukhshana Media and the author of The Vanishing Girl Of Kabul, this is a serious problem. ‘It’s a horrific practice: to be forced to dance and to be abused by these men,’ she tells me. ‘And the victims suffer twice. In Afghan culture it is a horrible stigma to be used like this.’
Zahra Joya, editor in chief of Rukhshana Media, says: 'In Afghan culture it is a horrible stigma to be used like this’
Afghanistan’s rigid segregation of the sexes has only worsened under the Taliban, which has made bacha bazi more entrenched
She continues: ‘Rich men want the young to dance for them, and more. Of course, for women dancing is forbidden, so they use boys.’
This is crucial: one reason bacha bazi became so entrenched was Afghanistan’s rigid segregation of the sexes, which has only worsened under the Taliban. Women are entirely excluded from most gatherings and certainly cannot dance before men outside their family. So young boys – sometimes dressed in women’s clothes, wearing make-up and performing ‘feminine’ dances – fill the role of entertainers instead. The poorest boys are easy prey for powerful, sexually frustrated men.
One day, soon after Mustafa returned to work, he was cycling down the road when he was accosted by yet more men. ‘We know you,’ they told him. ‘We have heard you are a good boy – very delicious.’ They grabbed him and raped him.
And on it went. Mustafa is a talented dancer. He loses himself in it; on stage, nothing matters; and for a moment he escapes the misery of his existence. It’s also a way for him to earn money for his near-destitute family. They often need necessities such as clothes and shoes. As a boy, men would offer him about 3,000 Afghanis (roughly £34) to dance. But at the end of the performance, things changed.
‘When payment time comes, they tell me that they will pay me, but I have to do something else.’
He pauses, as if in physical pain. ‘Sometimes I would go into the changing room and see two or three people there and they would just take me by force.’
He continues, his voice faltering as his face floods with shame. ‘And sometimes I would take the money as my family needs it so much.’ The payment varies depending on the size of the party and the people there. Often, he is offered just 500 Afghanis (£6).
‘After one party, I couldn’t stand up properly for a long time,’ he says, grimacing with discomfort at the memory.
‘Two of the men shared me – passing me between them. It was so damaging to my body.’
How does it make you feel? I ask. ‘When they do this to me the world goes dark,’ he replies. I lose the ability to use my hands and feet. It’s like I’m dying.’ Mustafa is now 20 – and it is still happening. I ask him how many men he thinks have done this to him. He can’t be sure as it’s often the same men abusing him but altogether he thinks he has been a victim of bacha bazi about 70 or 80 times.
I ask him how widespread the practice is. ‘It’s everywhere,’ he replies. ‘Four or five of my friends suffered the same but a local NGO intervened and got them to safety in Pakistan.’
What also becomes clear from speaking to Mustafa is that – just like the mainly Pakistani child-rape gangs in Britain – the perpetrators are highly organised.
Sometimes he would finish dancing, come outside and see a car waiting. The men would force him inside.
‘They don’t say where we are going and they cover my eyes [so I] don’t know where exactly I am,’ he tells me. ‘We arrive at a villa or garden; they keep me there for four or five hours.’
The men are different. Some are rich, others less so. Some are gangsters and refuse to pay him. Here he becomes distraught, almost unable to get the words out. ‘The powerful people… they take me away… and do it to me by force.’ And then there are the much older men obsessed with his youth. ‘They tell me that “we love boys – they are so much more joyful for us”.’
Combating bacha bazi was one of the reasons that the Taliban emerged as an organised force in the Darwinian nightmare of early-1990s Afghanistan, where warlords and militia commanders ruled. Among the abuses that most enraged the Taliban’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and his followers was the sexual abuse of girls.
According to Taliban legend, in the spring of 1994 in a Pashtun village 25 miles west of the city of Kandahar, locals told Omar that a local militia commander had abducted and repeatedly raped two teenage girls.
Omar gathered about 30 Talibs (religious students and former fighters) and, with only 16 rifles between them, attacked the commander’s position and freed the girls. The commander was then hanged from the barrel of his own tank, his body left dangling as a warning.
After seizing Kandahar and then Kabul, the first Taliban regime outlawed bacha bazi. From 1996 until the regime fell in 2001, it was an offence punishable by death and accounts suggest the Taliban succeeded in driving it largely underground. Their Islamic courts were notorious for public executions – sometimes staged before crowds of up to 30,000 at Kabul Stadium – as well as floggings and amputations.
When the US and its allies toppled the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden in the years after 9/11, bacha bazi made a comeback. Warlords and militia commanders who had once fought the Taliban returned to positions of power – this time, often as allies of the US-led coalition. Human Rights Watch documented numerous instances of commanders and their forces raping boys, as well as women and girls, with impunity.
More disturbingly, however, the abuse often came from the very Afghan forces the West was pouring billions into training and equipping. Coalition soldiers regularly found themselves working alongside men who raped little boys and girls – and were powerless to stop them.
For British troops, the reality could be especially horrifying. One reservist, interviewed for a 2025 study of British Afghanistan veterans published by the US Army War College, recalled watching a farmer drag away a screaming child and rape him.
The soldier expected two Afghan National Army men nearby to intervene – but instead they joined in. The soldier’s platoon commander ordered the British troops not to intervene either, fearing reprisals and an insider attack, and the British reservist later said he felt as though he was protecting the men while they raped the child.
He later became unable to tolerate the sound of children crying because it reminded him of the rape. He suffered from PTSD and eventually attempted suicide.
The researchers do not give the date of the incident, although the British veterans in their study served in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2014.
A therapist interviewed for the same study described another veteran’s account of an Afghan police officer taking a boy thought to be just six or seven into a cave and raping him.
And in 2006, in the town of Sangin in Helmand Province, soldiers reacted with fury when they were ordered to protect a district police chief whom locals accused of abducting and raping children. ‘Why the hell are we going to support this guy?’ a platoon commander remembered his outraged soldiers asking him. ‘We should go and kill him.’
American troops faced the same nightmare. According to a September 2015 article by Joseph Goldstein in The New York Times, Marine Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr told his father in his final phone call home that he could hear Afghan police sexually abusing boys they had brought on to their base.
‘At night we can hear them screaming but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,’ his father recalled him saying.
Buckley told his father that his officers had instructed him to look the other way because ‘it’s their culture’. Buckley was shot dead at the base in 2012. A year earlier, Goldstein reported, Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn confronted a US-backed Afghan militia commander who was keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.
Captain Quinn and Sergeant First Class Charles Martland beat the commander; Quinn was subsequently relieved of his command and pulled out of Afghanistan. He later said America had ended up putting men into power ‘who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did’.
The Afghan government eventually acted – and in 2017 criminalised bacha bazi, introducing lengthy prison sentences with tougher penalties for officials and members of the security forces.
But laws are meaningless when there is no will to enforce them.
Even if the practice is officially illegal, the predators, as I discovered talking to Mustafa, often remain untouchable.
Listening to him I feel pity, horror and rage. Eventually I ask the obvious question. Why don’t you tell the Taliban? After all, they loathe this practice. ‘In the eyes of the Taliban, we are more guilty than the people who do this. They would ask me why I went to the parties,’ he replies. ‘If bacha bazi boys report these crimes to the government, they kill us.’
Zahra Joya from Rukshana Media confirms this. ‘Many Taliban are involved in bacha bazi, and even if not, many of them accept it,’ she says. ‘If a victim were to go to the police, the chief might just ignore his report, or even assault him. This is the tragedy.’
Without any hope of justice, how will the abuse ever stop, I ask Mustafa? ‘It will finish when I die,’ he replies simply.
‘Maybe one day someone will kill me and then, in the next world, it will finally end.’
Until then, the victims of bacha bazi will continue to live in agony – a lasting testament to the West’s failure to end the barbarity and of the problems that Afghanistan is simply unable to escape, no matter who rules over it.
