What Did Taliban do with WOMEN? *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

When the Taliban first appeared, many Afghan  women thought the chaos of war was finally ending. What they didn’t know was that a very different  kind of nightmare was just beginning. And nothing they had lived through could have prepared  them for the way the Taliban treated them. In 1977, before the Taliban, Afghanistan  looked very different.

In the capital, Kabul, women worked as judges, members of parliament,  doctors, teachers, and government officials. They walked around the city in regular clothes,  attended university, studied law and medicine, and built successful careers.  This wasn’t rare or unusual. One of them was Dr. Anahita Ratebzad.

She was elected to parliament in 1965 and became one of Afghanistan’s best-known female  politicians. She was also a physician who strongly supported women’s education and equal rights. But  she wasn’t the only one. By the 1970s, Afghanistan had a growing class of educated women who had  slowly earned an important place in public life. Life was very different outside the cities.

In  many rural areas, conservative tribal traditions meant most women stayed at home, married at a  young age, and never received a formal education. Even so, the country’s official  direction was changing. Afghanistan’s 1964 Constitution gave women  the right to vote, and by the late 1970s, the communist government in Kabul was  pushing girls’ education across the country.

In some villages, these reforms were even  forced on people who strongly opposed them. Everything changed in 1979 when the Soviet Union  invaded Afghanistan to support the communist government. The war lasted for ten years. More  than one million Afghans were killed, and around six million fled the country as refugees.

Schools,  courts, government offices, and many other institutions that had slowly expanded women’s  rights were damaged or completely destroyed. When Soviet forces left Afghanistan  in 1989, the fighting did not end. Instead, the country fell into another  civil war. Between 1992 and 1996, the different mujahideen groups that had fought the  Soviets turned their weapons against each other.

Kabul became one of the main battlefields,  and much of the city was destroyed. For women, these years were already a nightmare.  R*pe was used as a weapon of war. Women were kidnapped from their homes. In areas controlled  by fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a powerful warlord who received support from both  the United States and Pakistan at different times, women who appeared in public without  full covering risked acid attacks.

All of this happened before the Taliban  had taken control of a single major city. In 1994, a new group of religious students emerged  who promised to end the fighting, restore law and order, and enforce Islamic law across the country.  After years of violence and chaos, many ordinary Afghans, including women who were exhausted  by the constant war, initially welcomed them.

The group’s leader was Mullah Mohammed  Omar, a former mujahideen fighter who had lost his right eye during the war against  the Soviets. He rarely appeared in public, was almost never photographed, and was deeply  committed to his beliefs. In September 1994, Taliban fighters captured Kandahar  with almost no resistance.

Just two months later, they controlled twelve  of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. They entered Kabul on September 27, 1996. Within  hours, they captured former President Mohammad Najibullah from the United Nations compound where  he had lived under protection for four years. He was tortured, castrated, killed, and his  body was hanged from a traffic light in the middle of the city. It was a brutal warning  of what the new rulers were willing to do.

For women, the warning came through a series  of new laws announced over the following days. One by one, nearly every  freedom they had disappeared. Girls older than eight were immediately banned  from going to school. Every girl who had been sitting in a classroom the day before was suddenly  told she could no longer continue her education.

Women were also fired from government jobs. This  wasn’t just an administrative decision. Women made up about 70% of Kabul’s teachers, 50% of its civil  servants, and 40% of its doctors. Removing them caused the city’s education system and healthcare  system to fall into crisis within weeks. Women were also banned from leaving their  homes unless they were accompanied by a mahram, a close male guardian such as a husband, father,  brother, or son. There were no exceptions.

This was especially devastating for the estimated  30,000 to 50,000 widows living in Kabul, many of whom had lost their husbands during  fifteen years of war. Without a male guardian, they could not work, buy food, visit a  doctor, or even move around the city. The Taliban also ordered windows facing  the street to be painted black or covered so women inside the house could not be seen.

Wearing the burqa, a full-body covering with a small mesh screen over the eyes, became  mandatory whenever women went outside. Many Afghan women had worn the burqa by choice  for generations, especially in conservative areas. Under the Taliban, it was no longer a choice.  Anyone who refused could be punished immediately. These rules were enforced by the Ministry for the  Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, commonly known as the morality police. Its  officers patrolled the streets carrying batons.

Women were beaten for showing a wrist or an  ankle. They were beaten for laughing too loudly. Some were even beaten for wearing shoes that made  noise while walking because the Taliban believed women should not draw any attention to themselves,  even through the sound of their footsteps. The healthcare system created  another deadly problem.

Women were forbidden from being treated by male  doctors. But many female doctors had already been forced out of their jobs. As a result,  thousands of women suffering from infections, pregnancy complications, or other treatable  illnesses had nowhere to go. Some died from medical problems that could have been treated  in less than an hour at a normal hospital.

By 1998, the effects of Taliban rule could  be measured. That year, Physicians for Human Rights carried out a major study of women  living in Kabul. The results were shocking. Ninety-seven percent of the women  surveyed showed signs of major depression, while 71% met the medical standards for  post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

The United Nations estimated that year  that around 8,000 women in Kabul alone were suffering from severe psychological trauma.  Years of war had already destroyed the economy, but removing women from the  workforce made things even worse. Many families had depended on a wife or  mother’s government salary to survive.

Once those jobs disappeared, so did the  income that kept entire households alive. But within months of the Taliban taking Kabul,  secret schools began appearing across the city. They were hidden in basements, behind  closed curtains inside private homes, or disguised as sewing groups and cooking classes.

Women and girls would arrive wearing their burqas so they wouldn’t attract attention. Once the doors  were shut, the books came out, and lessons began. Even though education had been banned for  girls, children continued learning in secret. One of the main groups behind these schools was the Revolutionary Association of the Women  of Afghanistan, better known as RAWA.

The organization had been founded  in 1977 by Meena Keshwar Kamal, a young women’s rights activist who was only 20  years old. She was assassinated in 1987, but the group continued its work throughout the Taliban  years. RAWA secretly ran classrooms, helped women, and gathered evidence of Taliban abuses.

By 1999,  an estimated 30,000 children, most of them girls, were being educated through underground schools  in Kabul alone. Any teacher who was caught could be flogged or sent to prison. Some were  arrested, but many continued teaching anyway. Women also continued running beauty salons  in secret after the Taliban banned them as immoral businesses.

Families hid written records  of Taliban crimes inside the walls of their homes so the evidence would not be found. British-Afghan  journalist Saira Shah secretly entered Afghanistan and filmed life under Taliban rule for the  documentary *Beneath the Veil*, released in 2001. The film showed public executions, women being  beaten in the streets, and interviews with women who spoke in whispers because they feared someone  outside might hear them.

For many people in the West, it was the first time they had actually  seen what life under the Taliban looked like. The international community slowly began  responding. By 1997, the Clinton administration had publicly condemned the Taliban’s treatment  of women. That same year, the Feminist Majority Foundation, led by Eleanor Smeal, launched a  major campaign that gathered millions of petition signatures, lobbied American politicians, and  pushed the US government to take stronger action.

In 1999, the United States imposed  economic sanctions on the Taliban. But sanctions did little to  change life inside Afghanistan. The first Taliban government did not  fall because of diplomacy or protests. It ended because of something that  happened on a Tuesday morning in September. That day, September 11, in 2001, Al-Qaeda carried  out terrorist attacks against the United States.

After the attacks, the Taliban refused to  hand over Osama bin Laden, who was being sheltered in Afghanistan. That decision quickly  sealed the regime’s fate. The United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7,  2001. By November 13, fighters from the Northern Alliance had entered Kabul.

By December, the  Taliban had retreated into their strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan or  escaped across the border into Pakistan. For Afghan women, life changed almost overnight.  Schools reopened. Women returned to work. On December 22, 2001, Hamid Karzai  became Afghanistan’s interim leader. Sima Samar, a physician who had spent the Taliban  years secretly running underground schools and illegal medical clinics, was appointed Deputy  Prime Minister and Minister for Women’s Affairs.

The woman who had once hidden textbooks inside her  home was now serving in the country’s government. The Bonn Agreement, signed on December  5, 2001, created the legal foundation for Afghanistan’s new government and specifically  included protections for women’s rights. The new Constitution, adopted in 2004, guaranteed  equal rights for men and women under Afghan law.

By 2005, women held 27% of the seats  in Afghanistan’s new parliament, a larger share than women held  in the US Congress at that time. The changes continued over the next two  decades. By 2010, about 2.7 million girls were attending school across Afghanistan,  compared with almost none during Taliban rule.

By 2020, that number had grown to around 3.5  million. Female life expectancy increased from about 45 years in 2001 to 66 years by 2019. The  number of women dying during childbirth dropped by more than half over the same period. Women became  judges, police officers, pilots, and mayors. Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who had secretly attended an  underground school as a child during Taliban rule, went on to found Afghanistan’s first  girls’ boarding school, SOLA, in 2008.

She became one of the best-known symbols  of how much the country had changed. The twenty years between 2001 and 2021 were  not simply a success story that suddenly ended. During the war, the United States and its allies  spent about $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan. A large amount of that money disappeared  through corruption, dishonest contracts, and theft inside the Afghan government.

On  paper, the Afghan National Security Forces had around 300,000 soldiers. But many of those troops  were “ghost soldiers” who did not actually exist. Corrupt commanders kept collecting their  salaries while pocketing the money themselves. At the same time, the Taliban quietly built  a parallel government in many rural parts of Afghanistan.

They collected taxes from poppy  farmers, controlled important trade routes, and operated their own courts. Many villagers,  frustrated by corruption in the official government, actually preferred using Taliban  courts to settle disputes. The Taliban also never stopped fighting. Every year, they killed  Afghan soldiers, police officers, and civilians. They also focused on women who had  become symbols of the country’s progress.

Safia Amajan, the head of Kandahar’s Department  of Women’s Affairs, was assassinated in 2006. Sitara Achakzai, a provincial council member  and outspoken supporter of women’s rights, was shot outside her home on April 12, 2009. Female  journalists, teachers, judges, police officers, and other professional women were targeted again  and again.

It was a deliberate campaign to scare women away from public life by showing what  could happen to anyone who stepped forward. The Afghan government also had serious failures.  The Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, passed in 2009, made child marriage and  domestic violence illegal. But laws meant very little if they were not enforced.

A United  Nations report published in 2016 found that 87% of Afghan women had experienced at least one  form of gender-based violence during their lives. Outside the cities, many girls were still  forced into marriage. Some were promised to much older men when they were only six years old in  exchange for bride prices paid to their families. Even with all these problems, something important  had still been built.

A whole generation of girls grew up without ever living under Taliban rule. To  them, going to school felt normal, not dangerous. Zarifa Ghafari became mayor of Maidan Shahr  in 2018 when she was just 26 years old. She survived three assassination  attempts but continued going to work. That was the Afghanistan  that still existed in 2020.

Then came Doha. On February 29, 2020, the United States signed  an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar. The Afghan government was not  included in the negotiations. Women’s rights groups were also  left out. Under the agreement, the United States promised to withdraw all of  its troops, while the Taliban promised not to give safe haven to terrorist groups and to take  part in peace talks with the Afghan government.

The Taliban quickly resumed  attacking Afghan government forces, arguing that their ceasefire only applied  to American troops. Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government began in Doha  in September 2020 but made almost no progress. The Taliban gave up very little because  they believed time was on their side.

In April 2021, President Joe Biden confirmed  that all American troops would leave Afghanistan by September. Everyone understood what that  meant, including US intelligence officials, Afghan leaders, and the Taliban. Taliban fighters  began capturing districts across the country during May and June.

American intelligence  believed the Afghan government could survive for six months to two years after the withdrawal.  Instead, Kabul fell on Sunday, August 15, 2021, less than four months later. President  Ashraf Ghani fled the country by helicopter, reportedly carrying bags of cash. Within  hours, the Afghan government had collapsed. In the days before Kabul fell, many women rushed  to erase the lives they had spent twenty years building.

They burned their university degrees,  destroyed photographs showing them at work, deleted records from their computers and phones,  and painted over beauty salon signs during the night. Activists desperately called anyone who  might help them escape. Some succeeded. Zarifa Ghafari left Afghanistan on August 18. Most women  had no connections, no paperwork, and no time. The scenes at Kabul’s airport soon became some  of the most recognizable images of the decade.

Tens of thousands of people crowded around the  gates, hoping to escape before it was too late. At least seven people died in the crush. Videos  of desperate people falling from American military aircraft after trying to cling to the outside  spread around the world within hours. Between August 14 and August 30, the US-led evacuation  airlifted about 123,000 people out of Afghanistan.

But an unknown number of those who needed  to leave the most were left behind. Two days after taking Kabul, on August 17, 2021, the Taliban held a press conference.  Their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told journalists from around the  world that the Taliban had changed. He said women would be allowed to work and study  within the framework of Islamic law.

He also promised there would be no revenge against former  enemies. His words sounded calm and moderate. It did not last. Within days, women arriving  at government offices were told to go home and stay there until further  notice. On September 7, 2021, the Taliban announced their new government. Not  a single woman was given a cabinet position.

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which had  existed since 2001, was abolished. In its place, the Taliban brought back the Ministry for the  Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the same morality police that had enforced  their strict rules during the 1990s. On September 17, secondary schools reopened  across most of Afghanistan, but only for boys.

Girls above the sixth grade were told to wait for  another announcement. Families waited for months. Finally, March 23, 2022, was announced as the day  girls could return to high school. That morning, thousands of girls and teachers arrived at  their schools only to find the gates locked. Overnight, Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah  Akhundzada, who rarely appears in public and rules mainly from Kandahar, had canceled  the reopening.

Reports suggested that some Taliban leaders had supported reopening the  schools, but his decision overruled them all. Another major blow came on December 20, 2022,  when the Taliban banned women from attending universities. Thousands of female students  who were already studying for degrees were suddenly told their education was over.  The order also included another rule.

If women at a university were not  following Taliban requirements, male students could also be prevented  from attending. The policy was meant to pressure men and their families into  supporting the restrictions placed on women. That same month, women were also banned from  working for non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. This created a huge humanitarian problem.

Aid organizations employed thousands of Afghan women, and female aid workers were often the only  people allowed to reach women who needed food, healthcare, and other assistance  because of strict gender segregation. In April 2023, the Taliban extended the ban to  Afghan women working for the United Nations. The result was severe disruption to  aid operations at a time when the UN estimated that 28.3 million Afghans depended  on humanitarian assistance just to survive.

The restrictions continued growing. Women were  once again banned from parks, gyms, and beauty salons. Female voices slowly disappeared from  radio broadcasts. Some women still protested in Kabul during August and September 2021 despite the  danger. Many were beaten, arrested, or taken away. The women who managed to escape Afghanistan  after August 2021 are now spread across Europe, North America, and the Gulf countries.

From  abroad, many continue speaking about what is happening inside Afghanistan, even though  they can no longer change events directly.