Afghanistan Peace CampaignAmanda Abou Abdallah
The Taliban did not just ban women from schools, impose the burqa and outlaw smartphones. The Taliban built a system that enslaves nearly half the country’s population, or according to outdated statistics: 21,701,532 women and girls.
In general, the Taliban’s system runs on laws that get changed, forgotten or scrapped as needed to oppress women, such as the abolition of the minimum marriage-age law, which made the only “legitimate” criterion for a girl’s marriage that she has reached puberty or in other words, that she is “fit for consummation”.
And so, the state/group encourages economically crushed families, impoverished by the Taliban, to sell their young daughters in exchange for a dowry that lets them support the rest of the family.
Or the law that legitimises domestic violence under the label of “corrective beating”, which gives a husband the right to beat his wife, as long as he does not cause fractures or serious injuries.
The Taliban also made sure to restrict the right to request divorce and shut down most shelters for abused women. If a girl or woman tries to escape this tragedy, the “morality police” pursue her.
This tightening chokehold has made Afghanistan one of the few countries in the world where women’s suicide rates exceed men’s (globally, they are almost twice as common among males), with 75% to 80% of recorded suicide cases and attempts being women and girls.
And if a woman survives an attempt to end her life, she usually cannot find treatment, because women are forbidden from being treated by male doctors.
At the same time, the number of female doctors keeps shrinking through emigration or retirement, and because girls are banned from studying.
So the only option left for many women is to wait for death in silence, because of course their voices are considered shameful to be heard. So what could a system like this be called, other than enslavement?
Despite all this, Afghan women are fighting for their freedom, opening secret schools for girls, documenting violations and publishing them online under pseudonyms, and even protesting.
In June, a very rare public demonstration took place, one of the few since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, after the Americans withdrew. Women and men took to the streets of Herat demanding education, work and freedom, in the face of violent security crackdowns, arrests and a media blackout.
But despite the blackout, the problem was never that the “civilised” world does not know what is happening. It knows very well what happened and what was done in Afghanistan, but as usual, it chose to just watch.
Amanda Abou Abdallah, is the founder of Khateera, a women-led platform covering the Arab region