Taliban regime in Afghanistan | Afghan women suffocate

In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, Afghan women told us about their fear of going back 20 years. Four months later, we heard from them.

Lea Carrier
Press

One took refuge in the United States. The other hides in a neighboring country to escape persecution. And the last remained at the front to defend the rights of women, risking her life.

“Every moment, every second, I live in fear. The situation is getting worse day by day. I don’t know what to do anymore, ”drops Hoda Raha.

What she dreaded happened. Their valuable strides for equality did not survive the Taliban’s return to power. Twenty years of small victories gone up in smoke.

Hoda Raha, 27, is however not new to resistance. A seasoned activist, she has participated in several campaigns for women’s equality, including the right to include their names on official documents. In the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power, his motivation was bleak. As if all her life, she had been preparing for it.

Four months later, his voice no longer has the same confidence. She shakes at times.

“With each passing day, the situation becomes more stifling for women,” she unpacks, panting.

When they took power, the Taliban presented themselves in a new light, promising a more moderate policy than that of the regime’s first incarnation in the late 1990s. Women’s rights would be respected “within the framework of the Islamic law, ”they said.

Idle words, Hoda retorts.

In fact, high school students and teachers are banned in the vast majority of schools across the country. In mosques, it is taught that women who study or work do not “care about their families” and that “true Muslims” must learn “to cook and take care of children,” Hoda reports.

The Taliban reinforced these mentalities at the beginning of December, when they published their “decree on the rights of women”, which, while it stipulates that women are not “property” and prohibits forced marriage, makes no claim. mention of the right to education or work. At the end of the month, the new rulers of Kabul also announced that women who wish to travel a distance of more than 70 km must henceforth be accompanied by a male relative of their close family.

But the worst, according to Hoda, are the domestic violence and extremist beliefs to which women are subjected within their own families, particularly outside the big cities.

“I have traveled to rural areas and you cannot imagine [toutes les] women and adolescent girls who believe these words and think they should stay at home, ”she laments.

The great crossing

Farah * had just got engaged. In August, she was abruptly separated from the one she had promised herself. She had a seat on a flight to America, he didn’t.

At night, lying on her little bed in a refugee camp in Philadelphia, she dreams of her eyes, “green and deep as the forest”. When bombs and gunfire don’t haunt his sleep.

The 25-year-old official boarded one of the first planes after Kabul fell without a fight. One cool August morning, his brother, who also worked for the Afghan government, ordered him to go to the airport.

It was just after the explosion claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State, which had killed around 100 people. “The oppression and terror were just beginning,” Farah breathes.

She described to us in detail the horror scene at the airport. Bloody clothes and shoes on the floor. The opacity of tear gas in the air. The crowd on the tarmac. With her clothes on her back and nothing else, she boarded the military plane, with no return date.

“I quit my whole life. My books, my drawings, my country, my friends, my family, my house, my fiancé. I feel like I am nothing here. Sometimes I feel like I’m living dead, ”she says.

“Women were the soul of the cities”

In the first weeks after the Taliban returned, the streets of Kabul had lost their color.

“Women were the soul of the cities. What made people want to continue was the noise of girls laughing in the streets, their efforts to go to work, to school, ”recalls Hoda Raha.

In their homes, women remain connected to each other through social networks. They share their concerns, give themselves new hope, and plan their resistance. Like Adine *, 20, who continues her fight from outside the country, on Twitter.

When we first spoke to her, she still had hopes of going to college last fall, like all the women before her for twenty years or so.

However, the Taliban have taken control of universities, banning mixed classes. Female students should be separated from their male classmates. According to Adine, some friends were also banned from entering their campus because they did not wear a hijab.

In October, she got tired of waiting for a miracle. She left with a backpack on her back to Pakistan. “I am disappointed, tired, broken and homeless. Nothing comforts me anymore. It’s painful, ”she wrote to us at the time.

She stayed there for a few weeks, before her journey took her to Albania, where she is still waiting for her immigration case to be processed in the United States. She’s safe, she says, but her heart is no longer there.

He stayed in Kabul.

“One day my country will be free”

Despite the kilometers that separate them, these three women are still united by the same dream of equality. The fight will be long, painful. But they remain hopeful. They are no longer the women of 20 years ago.

“Future generations must know that in this unequal world which has always considered women as inferior beings, their mothers will have sacrificed their lives and will have fought for their fundamental rights”, promises Hoda.

Farah also believes in better days when she returns home.

“A Persian proverb says that the country is our spiritual mother. I left my mother. But one day my country will be free and I will go back. ”

* In order to ensure the safety of the women interviewed, we used fictitious first names.