Afghan women voice their fears about Taliban rule

The Taliban has captured the capital Kabul in Afghanistan after capturing other Afghan provincial capitals – and the country is in disarray. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country, as have many foreign nationals. However there are many Afghans and foreign nationals who wish to depart, who no longer can.

Afghan women and their international allies are worried that the Taliban rule will set the country back decades, stripping away any hard-earned freedoms won post-2001 US invasion.

Lima Halima Ahmad, PhD candidate of International Security & Human Security tweeted forlornly, criticising foreign news sources who have been claiming that Afghans sympathise with the Taliban and sharia law.

Another Afghan, Aisha Ahmad, who doesn’t have a Twitter photo of herself out of security concerns, tweeted her worries about the future, especially for Afghan girls and women.

Ian Dunt, a columnist at the UK’s iNews, has tweeted an article where Afghanistan’s first female mayor talks of waiting with her family for the Taliban to knock on her door: “There is no one to help me or my family. I’m just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and kill me. I can’t leave my family. And anyway, where would I go?”

PR Executive Joel Reji has tweeted an open letter from Afghan filmmaker Sahraa Karimi, in which she summarises what has happened in the last few weeks and asks for support: “They [the Taliban] have massacred our people, they kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men, they murdered a woman for her attire, they gouged the eyes of a woman, they tortured and murdered one of our beloved comedians, they murdered one of our historian poets, they murdered the head of culture and media for the government, they have been assassinating people affiliated with the government, they hung some of our men publicly, they have displaced hundreds of thousands of families.”

University lecturer Muska Dastageer has quoted a tweet from a Taliban spokesperson, asking him to reassure Afghan women that the Taliban will not force young girls and women into unwilling marriages with Taliban fighters.

Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim has tweeted a message she received from “a feminist friend in Afghanistan” in which she (the friend) shares her fears with Erhaim.

Al Aan TV journalist Jenan Moussa has quoted a thread by freelance journalist Samira Shackle in which Shackle explains how she has tried to get out a female TV journalist and her children from Afghanistan but now has to continue her efforts with no flights out of the country.

Some were quick to point fingers, whether it was to blame US ex-president Donald Trump and his staff, or current President Joe Biden.

Former Deputy Minister of Women Affairs Hosna Jalil, on the other hand, believes the ‘blame game’ “won’t help anyone,” while accusing the United States as a whole as failing with its calculations.

“Everyone’s talking about how it’s [the Taliban rule] going to be peaceful. But it’s suffocating. It’s limiting,” Pashtana Zalmai Khan Durrani, Executive Director at LEARN, a non-profit in Afghanistan dedicated to education and resource building with a focus on women and girls’ rights, tells SheThePeople. 

First woman deputy speaker of parliament in Afghanistan and ex-chairperson of Women, Civil Society & Human Rights Commission Fawzia Koofi tweeted that she has tried to be a part of the peace talks in hopes that lives will be saved, but that her hopes were dashed.

And on a bigger scale, founder & CEO of Afghanistan Youth Leaders Assembly (AYLA) Batol Gholami has tweeted her disappointment with the international community.

Thumbnail photo: A member of Taliban forces inspects the area outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan August 16, 2021. (Reuters)

Headline photo: A member of Taliban (C) stands outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 16. (Reuters)