This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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I travelled around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This is what I saw

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

“I would rather be killed than wear a burqa,” Nazanin, one of the members of the Women for Afghan Women (WAW) organization, told me. The organization has been the biggest safe-house for marginalized women affected by war, conflicts, and crimes.

WAW has now paused its activities – resulting in thousands of women being dismissed from the shelters. Some face the danger of violence from their abusive husbands or other family members, some of whom are among the prisoners that the Taliban released after they wrested control, according to Nazanin.

Right now, the organization’s office in Kabul is occupied by Taliban troops and all its equipment has been taken to an unknown place. Nazanin has rarely been out of her home in the past two months. She is not the only one. Women's visibility in public has declined since the Taliban took over the country due to the abrupt regressive policies preventing women from going to work or to schools and universities.

Oppression via ‘nice requests’

“We are also Muslims obeying Islamic hijab, so I wonder why the Taliban emphasizes Islamic rules in its decrees,” said Masoude Hashemi, a former high school teacher who lost her job in Kabul due to the new policies.

When I asked Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban's cultural commission, why his group has shut public higher education institutions, he answered: “Capturing the cities one by one in a short time was also a surprise for us, we had no policy in advance and we need time to figure the problems out.” Most people believe that if and when the universities reopen, the classes will be segregated by gender, with women students allowed to be taught only by women. With few female teachers available, and most currently banned from working, Afghan women will be unable to attend most classes.

But the act of replacing the Women’s Affairs Ministry with one for ‘Preaching and Guidance’ was swift. And erasing women from public spaces is what Taliban spokesperson Zabidullah Mujahid proposed, when he asked women not to leave home because he was not sure whether the Taliban soldiers would treat them respectfully.

Controlling the public space and pushing women into the private one is the way the Taliban maintains power. Twenty years ago, the group resorted to whipping and battering to oppress women, now they do so under the guise of ‘nice requests’.

Women's clothes in Afghanistan are as diverse as the different hijabs of this family in a vehicle in Herat | Mahzad Elyassi. All rights reserved

Segregation of the sexes in public is a popular idea in Afghanistan. I heard it from Ostad Nadim, the former manager of the Art Institute of Kabul who believes that when men and women are mixed in classes, they perform poorly compared with segregated education. I heard it again in a taxi from Bayman to Kabul, which I shared with three other passengers, a driver, a farmer and a butcher. All three concurred with the Taliban’s policies of barring women and girls from university, citing the “immorality” that was taking place in the mixed universities of Kabul.

The next day I was in Farhat’s home. She had received her bachelor's degree in Kabul and now is unable to continue her studies. I told her what I heard from those men in the taxi. “They have their imagination about what was going on inside the universities,” she said. “Most people did not trust the system that was run by the US and had this idea that universities were not Islamic enough,” she explained. “I, however, felt the most secure in the university since after four years, my male classmates were like brothers to me,” she added.

Women like Farhat have found new allies in some of the men they attended university with, who are using social media to voice their opposition to the Taliban.

I met a group of these men in a café in Kabul. Ali, who is in his twenties, said: “Our women had more courage and concern than we did as we are merely tweeting while they are going out to protest against the Taliban even at the price of getting assaulted and beaten.”

Noorollah and his wife Arefeh both studied theater at Kabul university. They are now living in Bamyan, and hoping to immigrate to Iran or Europe, like so many others who consider immigration the last resort.

Arefeh told me that women in Bamyan have lost their small businesses, such as restaurants, gift shops and handicrafts, which were about to flourish thanks to tourism in the historical Bamyan. This makes them dependent on men.

Afghanistan’s abandoned women

A few years ago, I was invited to a wedding in a château in the south of France. The bride and groom were top-ranking old-timers of the UN in Kabul. Most of the guests were also working with the UN or other foreign organizations in Afghanistan. Not a single Afghan person had been invited to the wedding.

While the music was playing outside and people were dancing, I remember asking the cozy gathering in one of the rooms why they had not invited anyone from Afghanistan despite living there for ages. “Well, you know what? Afghans are not easy to befriend,” someone replied.

Afghanistan is a very complicated society, in which deep patriarchy, traditions, religious attitudes, ethnic conflicts, decades of war, rough neighborhoods, and political geography play their parts.
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