Being a woman under the power of the Taliban: a moving testimony

It was early afternoon and Zahra, her mother and three sisters were going to dinner with another sister when they saw people running and heard gunshots in the street.

“The Taliban are here!“People screamed.

In a few minutes, everything changed for this 26 year old girl living in Herat, the third largest city in Afghanistan.

Zahra grew up in an Afghanistan largely free of the Taliban, where women dared to dream of careers and girls were educated. For the past five years, she has worked with local nonprofit organizations to educate women and lobby for gender equality.

His dreams and ambitions collapsed Thursday night when the Taliban stormed the city, planting their white flags with a proclamation of the Islamic faith in a central square, while people, on motorbikes and cars, ran towards their houses.

Like most locals, Zahra, his parents and his five siblings they are now locked in their homes, too scared to go out and worried about the future. The Associated Press He preferred not to identify her by her full name so as not to make her a target.

“i am very surprised“, He said Zahra, a young woman with a round face and a soft voice. “How is it possible that as a woman who has worked so hard and tried to learn and move forward, I now have to hide and stay home?”.

Amid a lightning attack in recent days, the Taliban now controls more than two-thirds of the country, just two weeks before they state United plan to withdraw your last troops. And they slowly approach the capital, I accept.

The agency HIM HIM for refugees claims that almost 250,000 Afghans have fled home since the end of May for fear that the taliban reimpose their strict and ruthless interpretation of Islam, which virtually eliminates women’s rights. 80% of the displaced are women and children.

The fundamentalist group ruled the country for five years, until the invasion led by state United in 2001. Meanwhile, banned girls’ education and women’s right to work, and even refused to allow them to leave their homes without a male parent accompanying them. The Taliban also led public executions, chopping off of thieves’ hands and stoning of women accused of adultery.

The existence of such extreme measures has not been confirmed in areas where combatants taliban have taken recently. However, activists reportedly seized some houses and burned down at least one school.

In a park I accept, transformed since last week into a shelter for the displaced, families told the PA Friday that the girls come home in a rickshaw motorized in northern Takhar province were arrested and flogged for wearing “revealing sandals”.

A teacher in the province said no one was allowed to go out to the market without a male escort. Some 3,000 families, mostly from northern provinces recently taken over by the Taliban, now live in tents inside the park, some on the sidewalks.

Zahra stopped going to the office a month ago, when activists approached Herat, and worked remotely from home. But on Thursday, Taliban fighters broke through the city’s defensive lines and he has been unable to work since.

Tears rose to her eyes as she thought of the possibility of not being able to return to work; than her 12 year old sister I can’t keep going to school (“Love to learn”); than his older brother i can’t play soccer; or that I can’t go back to play guitar freely. The instrument hung on a wall behind her as she spoke.

She listed some of the achievements made by women over the past 20 years, since the overthrow of the taliban, gradual but significant advances in a society that remains deeply conservative and dominated by men: girls are now in school, and women are in Parliament, in government and in businesses.

Marianne O’Grady, Deputy Director of CARE International in I acceptShe said the progress made by women over the past two decades has been dramatic, especially in urban areas, adding that she cannot see things turning back to their former state, not even with the Taliban takeover. .

“Millions of people cannot be left without education“, He said. If women”They are back behind the walls and can’t go out as much, at least now they can educate their cousins ​​and neighbors and their own children in a way that couldn’t have happened 25 years ago”.

Still, the sense of fear seems pervasive, especially among women, as the Taliban forces take more territory every day.

“I have the impression that we are like a bird which makes a nest to live and spends all its time building it, but suddenly and without being able to do anything, it sees how others destroy it“, He said Zarmine Kakar, a 26-year-old women’s rights activist I accept.

Kakar I was a year old when the Taliban entered I accept for the first time in 1996, and she remembers a time when her mother would take her to buy ice cream, when the Taliban ruled. Her mother was whipped by a Taliban fighter for revealing her face for a few minutes.

“Today I still feel that if the Taliban come to power, we will go back to the same dark days“, He said.

(C) The Associated Press.-

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