The advent of a new Taliban regime in Afghanistan makes fear a new cut in rights and freedoms that could affect women, the main beneficiaries of the end in 2001 of the so-called Islamic Emirate, under which they could neither study nor work.
The Taliban then applied a strict religious interpretation according to which basically women could not have any kind of public life, hidden from the eyes of anyone other than their husband or male guardian. Those who violated its rules risked barbaric punishment, including public stoning.
During these last years, the Taliban have tried to wash their image, to the point that one of the representatives in the peace negotiations with the Government, Suhail Shaheen, has assured the British channel BBC that they now want women to continue having access to classes and jobs.
“We will respect the rights of women”, has promised this spokesman, which, however, has already anticipated some restrictions, such as that for example women should wear at least a hijab, a type of veil that covers at least the head and chest and leaves the face exposed.
The Taliban have also tried to deny reports about alleged abuses against women in the areas they have been conquering in recent days, although from the UN, their High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, warned last week that the information that came from the Asian country was worrying to say the least.
“We have received information from women and girls in various districts under the control of the Taliban who are prohibited from leaving home without a male guardian”, he warned, in a warning message about the consequences that the Taliban offensive could have for civilians, especially for the most vulnerable groups.
For an Afghan woman, the difference between having gone abroad or, like most, having stayed in her country, is at this moment all or nothing, living laughing or dying alive.
This is how Khadija describes it on the phone from her home in Kabul, frightened after the capture of her city by the Taliban, while asking for help from her sister-in-law Mina, a 28-year-old Afghan raised in Madrid since she was 7, who regrets not being able to do anything for her . “To die in life”, sentence in English Khadija, 23 years old.
“Tomorrow I will no longer go to university. The Taliban are like animals, they don’t understand the Koran. For them women should not be educated. It’s all over for us ”, he concludes.
ABANDONMENT AND ANGUISH
The feeling of abandonment and anguish is total for this young Afghan woman, who says that her husband has discouraged her from going to university, as when returning home she saw a Taliban patrol on the street and from now on she is in danger walking alone through the city.
“They have already announced that women over 15 must marry. They do not want us to be independent, they will kill us if we go out alone, or throw acid in our faces, “denounces Khadija, who does not believe in the relaxation of rules against women that the Taliban have announced with respect to the government they led. from 1996 to 2001.
“We want to leave Afghanistan, but we cannot. This is horrible, ”says this Afghan student.
Meanwhile, in a Madrid shopping center near his home, his sister-in-law Mina speaks perfect Spanish about her job in a multinational company. He came to Spain with his family at the age of 7, during the previous Taliban regime, fleeing repression and uncertainty.
Mina is one of 69 Afghans residing in Spain, according to the Spanish Interior Ministry. She thanks her parents for having grown up in Spain, where she feels protected, both by law and by citizens, “very respectful of us.”
She studied Tourism at the university, does not wear the Islamic veil and says that she enjoys going to the center of Madrid with her friends on the weekend.
But she is very concerned for her relatives in Kabul: “No woman in the world deserves to live locked up and threatened. With the Taliban, they will not be able to use their mobile phones, have Facebook or go out with their friends in the city ”.
THE FEAR OF WORKING WOMEN
Aaisha, a well-known Afghan presenter and journalist, told The Guardian in an interview that she has seen her life’s efforts unravel in what seemed like seconds.
“For many years, I worked as a journalist … to raise the voice of Afghans, especially Afghan women, but now our identity is being destroyed and we have done nothing to deserve this”he commented.
“In the last 24 hours, our lives have changed and we have been confined to our homes, and death threatens us at all times.”
Afghan women journalists constantly receive death threats from the Taliban and others who agree that women should not be treated as equals.
Another of the women, who used the name Fereyba, recalled in the note the exact moment when she heard that the Taliban were entering the gates of Kabul.
“I was away from home and I just got a call from my brother saying ‘Where are you? You have to go home right now, it was very scary. ” “You can’t imagine the image of the people and the eyes, and the faces and the expressions.”
Her voice strangled, she said that reports of women and girls beaten, forcibly handcuffed and raped left her in a panic that this could soon be her fate.
“First I am worried about myself because I am a girl, and also a woman journalist,” she said. “In the provinces they took some girls and used them as slaves.”
THE WORST COUNTRY FOR WOMEN
During the Taliban regime, one of its spokesmen even declared that “The face of a woman is a source of corruption.”
A study by UN Women calls the systematic segregation of Afghan society those years as a “Gender apartheid”, then women could not work or study from the age of 8 or go out to the balcony of their house without a man. No girl should speak out loud or laugh in the street, as no stranger should hear a woman’s voice.
Afghanistan was already in 2011 the worst country where a woman could live, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters foundation, and now everything indicates that the situation for them is only going to get worse.
Mina recalls that at her parents’ house she has photos of her aunt in Kabul in the 1970s, dressed in a miniskirt and fashionable outfits, like any urban woman at that time.
“It is not going back a few years, it is going back to the Middle Ages,” he firmly asserts. She freely married her husband in 2019 and the two have lived together ever since.
Khadija, however, believes that from now on no woman will be able to choose her life. He believes that most of the Taliban have “delusions and mental problems” and “do not understand what Afghanistan is, many are not even from here.”
It is the difference of being a woman in a country with or without freedoms, the luck of being protected by a State or waking up one day in a huge women’s prison.
(with information from EFE and EP)
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