The dark days of women in Afghanistan, under the Taliban Regime

   

1.      Preface 

After the Taliban regime took control of the country on August 15, 2021, they rolled back women’s rights advances and media freedom; the Islamic fundamentalists are tightening their control of women's freedoms– the foremost achievements of the past 20 years with the support of western countries.

With the fall of Kabul and all over the country to the Taliban Regime, one of the immediate and serious restrictions imposed by the Taliban regime was a restriction on women. The regime started to ban women from different activities and as soon as they banned women from working outside and removed all government positions from women and replaced them with Taliban fighters. 

 

The regime closed all provincial departments of the Ministry of Women Affairs and renamed them an extremist department by the name of Ministry Enjoin the good and forbid the wrong. As a result, more than one thousand women employees of the ministry of women's affairs lost their jobs and were forced to stay at home. This was not the only previous government administration that the Taliban dissolved, recently the regime dissolve Afghanistan’s human rights commission and five other government organizations.

 

Renaming women's affairs is not the only restriction against women, all public girls' school has been closed around the country, and more than a million school female teacher are forced to stay at home. Journalists, university lecturers, NGO workers, women beauty parlors, small entrepreneurs, women police and army members, and many other women service providers, even many female doctors and nurses lost their jobs. It was not just a loss of duty, but a large number of women were abused, and a large number of women fled the country.

 

2.      Violence Against Women Increased by 100%

In the weeks after the regime takeover, they announced policies and regulations that rolled back women’s rights back to the 90s decades during their first government. All girls' high schools have been closed down, and women are not permitted to go outside of their homes without a male consort.

 Every day they beat and whip the girls and women in public where they need to move for daily life. Whipping, beating, and verbal abuse of women not clothed in accordance with Taliban rules, or of women unaccompanied by a mahram.

A report says, nearly 90% of Afghan women have been abused during the last 10 months. Another new report, based on data from 20 provinces, shows that 2 in 3 women reported that they or a woman they know experienced some form of violence. According to a recent and updated evaluation, more than half of all Afghan women reported experiencing at least three types of violence since 2021, and more than 80 percent were married without their consent. 

Progress made in recent years toward protecting Afghan women’s rights and providing accountability for violence against women and girls has been undermined by the Taliban’s rise to power. The domestic violence rate is also extremely become high in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban, with women frequently physically, linguistically, and sexually abused by the Taliban and their family members.

Domestic violence is particularly prevalent after the fall of the Afghanistan government, and the number of female suicides has risen sharply since the Taliban took over. It is very natural; When they block the air, the flowers cling to death. In addition to the Taliban crisis that leads women to commit suicide, the Taliban atmosphere is also gripping women. There are still large numbers of domestic, kidnapping, and armed killings of women. In the last few days alone, there have been several murders, kidnaps, and suicides of women reported from around the country.

3.      Women fight against the Taliban

For more than nine months, women have been barred from work, education, sightseeing, and freedom. Women's protests have been repeatedly violently suppressed by Taliban forces, and in some cases, women protesters have been detained, kidnaped, and beaten. Among them, if other cases do not kill women, a number of women will commit suicide out of desperation, confusion, and depression.

In these days of famine and depression and despair, or more explicitly in these days of women's hard times, the Taliban are still engaged in eye-to-eye fights with women. One of the most recent orders of the Ministry of Enjoin the good and forbid the wrong of the Taliban was the order of women wearing hijab. According to the order, including Hijab/ Burqa, all women, especially female employers, should wear black masks and glasses so that their lips and eyes could not be seen in public.

After the fall of the former government and the reoccupation of Kabul by the Taliban, the brave women and girls of Afghanistan have become a symbol of resistance and freedom. Women activists in various cities, including Kabul, have repeatedly protested and bravely stood up against the tyrannical Taliban regime to petition for women's rights and human rights. These women, who for the past 20 years have been a symbol of progress and change in the country, are now a symbol of the struggle and are fighting against the strict policies of the Taliban.

 

 After two decades of major social change in the country, women are becoming more vulnerable than ever and are being marginalized every day. The Taliban stripped women of their right to education and employment after regaining power. These discriminatory policies of the Taliban caused women to take to the streets and protest against them.

Bread, work, freedom, or education was the latest slogan of the protesting women, who took to the streets of Kabul many times, chanting slogans against the ruling group. Bread, work, freedom, is one of the most influential slogans used by some women to achieve their rights. 

 

4.      Conclusion

When the Taliban took the control of Afghanistan in 1996, they famously banned women from holding jobs outside of their house, or even leaving home without a male guardian or chaperone. Women’s rights violations in Afghanistan were a major topic of public concern in the 1990s. In 2021, when the Taliban regime re-took the power, after exiting thousands of NATO troops, it was clear this group remained every bit as cruel and brutal towards women as in the 1990s.

But Afghanistan's society and women changed very well. Over the past two decades of NATO presence in the country, a genuine internal shift towards greater recognition of women’s rights had taken place. Women’s rights did improve significantly after the Taliban’s fall in 2001, as women and girls were again allowed to attend school, participate in the workforce and hold positions of authority in government.

  People believe that now, due to the pressures of the international community, the regime does not put much pressure on the people, while the situation is deplorable and has made it very difficult to breathe. If this group is recognized by the international community for its extremist policies, then human rights will lose their meaning. Girls' education will be completely abolished, forced marriages, the sale of women will become more common, and women will become sex slaves.

 Unfortunately, in the current situation, there is neither psychological nor human security, people are afraid of the arbitrary punishment of the Taliban and are forced to lead a secret life in different parts of the country. In public places, people are questioned for no reason and can not travel from one area to another in peace. Under the pretext of collecting weapons, they enter people's homes and, through house-to-house efforts, destroy people's night security. There is no bread, no work, and no freedom in Afghanistan, and the international community should not recognize this group, given this situation.