What stands out in the case of Liza Shams is not the brutality of the violence itself, but how her death was handled afterward. Neighbors of Liza heard screaming and called police before she was taken to the hospital. Her husband's family claimed she committed suicide by rat poison, and no autopsy was performed despite the family's request, even though the CT scan on the night she died showed multiple cheekbone fractures consistent with blunt force trauma. This is the recurring pattern in most cases of women killed in Afghanistan today: a suspicious death, a suicide claim from the husband's family, and no independent agency stepping in to verify.
This mechanism is not random. The Afghan Attorney General's office, which previously collected data on murdered women, was dissolved in 2023. Since then, the Taliban has maintained no statistical system for women who die from domestic violence. In a list of 231 cases documented by the organization Zan Times across 10 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, more than one-fifth were declared suicides, but only about one-quarter led to arrests, and many suspects were released after just a few days.
But the absence of data is only half the problem. The other half lies in the legal framework that the Taliban has constructed to legitimize this very imbalance. According to Amnesty International, decree number 18, roughly translated as regulations on divorce through the courts, was announced on May 14, 2026, stipulates that a girl's silence after puberty is considered consent to marriage, while granting broad authority to fathers and grandfathers in arranging marriages for minors. Meanwhile, men can unilaterally divorce without witnesses or court confirmation, while women seeking to end marriage must overcome multiple legal barriers that can only be pursued after puberty and with court approval. Before 2021, the legal marriage age for girls under Afghan civil law was 16, and marriage to girls under 15 was once criminalized under the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law—a legal framework that the Taliban completely abolished after taking power.
This cycle of powerlessness extends beyond the family sphere. It reflects a broader surveillance and punishment model that the Taliban is applying to anyone who had contact with the former system. An assessment by the British Ministry of Defence conducted by Major General Ben Cattermole noted that the threat to former Afghan military personnel who had worked with foreign forces "remains real, though diminished"—in a context where the United Nations recorded eight deaths and 29 arbitrary detentions of former Afghan security personnel in just the three months from April to June 2026. It is the same machinery: no independent oversight agency, personal data collected unilaterally, and virtually no legal consequences for those who cause harm.
What bears watching is whether international organizations can maintain pressure as the Taliban increasingly seals off its data and judicial systems. For American readers, this is not a distant harmless story: it is a lesson in what happens when a state eliminates all independent verification mechanisms against violence, and why global human rights organizations must continue to document each case, however slow and incomplete, the way Zan Times has done.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of self-harm, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline operates 24/7: call or text 988. Vietnamese support is available through an interpreter—you can say "Vietnamese" when connected. Chat online at 988lifeline.org.
A suspicious death, a suicide claim from the husband's family, and no authority stepping forward to verify the facts.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.