Activists hope a change in international law could help to address the intensifying erosion of women and girls’ rights in Afghanistan
Over the past three years, the world has watched in horror as women and girls in Afghanistan have had their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away.
In the face of inaction by the international community, a campaign for the conditions being imposed on Afghan and Iranian women to be made a crime under international law as gender apartheid was launched last year. What does the term mean and will it make a difference?
What does gender apartheid mean?
Gender apartheid is a term used to describe the systemic oppression, discrimination and segregation of a specific group based on gender.
Apartheid is defined as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.
Racial apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word for “separateness”, became a crime under international law in 1973 in response to the segregation and subjugation of black South Africans by the white ruling class in South Africa since 1948, and which continued until 1994.
Women’s rights activists, UN experts and lawyers argue that if you replace the word “racial” with “gender”, it becomes an accurate reflection of the condition of tens of millions of women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran.
What are activists calling for?
At the end of 2023, a campaign called End Gender Apartheid was launched by Afghan human rights activists, backed by United Nations experts, calling for gender apartheid in Afghanistan to be codified as a crime against humanity by the U
The campaign argues that current laws criminalising gender persecution do not reflect the intent, ideology and institutionalised nature of the systemic subjugation and deprivation of women in Afghanistan , where laws have been specifically crafted to constrain the lives of women and their role in society.
What is the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan?
Women and their status and rights have been pivotal to the Taliban’s governance of Afghanistan since it swept to power in August 2021, after the withdrawal of US and UK troops and the collapse of the democratic Afghan government.
In the past three years, the group has issued more than 80 edicts curtailing the rights of all Afghanistan’s women and girls.
In August, they published a new set of “vice and virtue” laws, which banned women from speaking in public, deeming their voices an “intimate” part of their bodies, and made it mandatory for women to cover every part of their body in thick cloth in public. It also made it illegal for women to look at a man who is not a relation.
The Taliban have also brought back flogging and the stoning and public execution of women for offences such as adultery.
What about calls for this also to apply to Iran?
Some human rights activists are also arguing that the term gender apartheid should also be applied to what is happening to women in Iran.
They argue that Iran’s new “hijab and chastity” bill imposes harsh penalties, including prison sentences of up to 10 years, on women who do not conform to a mandated dress code and head covering in public.
It also increases the surveillance of women and girls by the government to ensure they are conforming to the hijab regulations, using CCTV cameras on public transport and government-mandated “hijab watchers” and imposes more gender segregation in public spaces. An aggressive enforcement crackdown by the Iranian regime has seen women shot in their cars,dragged from the streets, tortured and imprisoned after being deemed to be in breach of strict hijab laws
The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran has called the law a form of gender apartheid, and said “authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”
However, others argue that the situation for women in Iran is not comparable to the plight of women in Afghanistan and while the Iranian authorities are undeniably imposing human rights abuses and severe gender discrimination on women and girls, it does not equate to gender apartheid.
Could making gender apartheid a crime against humanity make a difference?
Those calling for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime against humanity argue that the international community responded to racial apartheid in South Africa after it became a crime in 1973,eventually forcing the government to back down.
If gender apartheid was codified as a crime and applied to Afghanistan or Iran, states would theoretically be obliged to take action, to uphold the integrity of international laws. It would also increase pressure on countries to grant asylum to Afghan and Iranian women and girls and hopefully stop states from accepting the legitimacy of Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan and pursuing trade and diplomatic relations with them.
In September, Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands said it was planning to take the Taliban to the international court of justice (ICJ) for gender discrimination, which could strengthen the calls to codify gender apartheid under international law.
However, others argue that making gender apartheid a crime would have limited impact.
When it comes to Afghanistan, while activists push for sanctions and isolation of the Taliban, the international community has largely followed a policy of conditional engagement and there are signs that countries in the region are slowly building diplomatic bridges with the regime.
So far, no condemnation, sanctions or pressure from the international community has had any impact on the Taliban or the relentless oppression of women and girls in Iran and there is no prospect of governments engaging militarily in Afghanistan or Iran to protect their rights.
As one Afghan woman told the Guardian earlier this year: “Nobody is coming to help us.”
What is gender apartheid – and can anything be done to stop it?
Vice and virtue law weaponizes religion to justify Taliban’s oppressive rule.
New law faces opposition from within the Taliban’s ranks, governors, religious leaders and civil society.
The international community should prevent the further erosion of human rights in Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s new vice and virtue law, which places sweeping restrictions on women’s dress, mobility and public presence, is facing pushback from Afghan religious scholars, civil society, the wider Muslim community and even the Taliban themselves.
The law weaponizes religion to justify the Taliban’s oppressive rule, leaving millions of Afghan women and girls in a state of fear and uncertainty.
A Gross Misinterpretation of Islamic Teachings
The Taliban’s law, ratified on July 31, 2024, erases the hard-won rights of Afghan women over the past two decades. Women are now required to cover their entire bodies, including their faces, and their voices must be concealed in public spaces. The law goes further, barring women from traveling without a male guardian, and imposing restrictive dress codes and behavior rules. These limitations go beyond women’s rights, affecting public celebrations and banning music, all framed under an extremist interpretation of Islam. The law, if fully enforced, would undermine fundamental human rights while reinforcing the Taliban’s authoritarian rule.
Noting that the law grossly misinterprets Islamic teachings, scholars have publicly challenged the regime, arguing that the Taliban’s claims about women’s voices being awrah (nakedness) and the necessity for strict covering are not supported by the Quran or Sunnah. They point to numerous religious texts that affirm women’s voices were heard and respected during the Prophet Muhammad’s time, directly contradicting the Taliban’s position. For instance, Quranic verses such as 60:12 and 58:1 show women engaging in verbal communication with the Prophet, while the hadiths narrated by Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, further prove that women’s voices were never meant to be silenced in Islamic tradition. These scholars have highlighted that morality enforcement, according to Islam, is the responsibility of the Muslim community as a whole, not the state, debunking the Taliban’s justifications.
Taliban Split on Vice and Virtue Law
There are increasing signs of internal division within the Taliban regarding the implementation of the vice and virtue law. Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada’s unusual visit to northern and western Afghanistan earlier in September, covering eight provinces, including Takhar, Badghis, Balkh and Kunduz, highlights efforts to address growing dissent among local officials and tribal leaders. According to reports, multiple governors have refused to enforce the vice and virtue law, while one of the Taliban’s chief negotiators of the 2020 Doha agreement and deputy minister of foreign affairs, Abbas Stanikzai, has publicly spoken against its restrictions on women.
The Taliban’s efforts to enforce this law will not only exacerbate public resistance but reveal the internal conflicts that may threaten their grip on power.
These divisions have led to internal fractures, with local leaders questioning the law’s implementation. As one leader of the Ahmadzai tribe told one of the authors, “It feels like there has been a death in everyone’s family … because their daughters can’t go to school.” This discontent highlights the law’s psychological and economic toll, affecting families and the country’s well-being by limiting women’s participation in society and weakening the economy. The Taliban’s efforts to enforce this law will not only exacerbate public resistance but reveal the internal conflicts that may threaten their grip on power.The growing resistance to the Taliban’s law is not limited to Afghan scholars. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its scholars have also expressed their disapproval, with some delegations snubbing Taliban officials at recent meetings. Even traditionally conservative members like Saudi Arabia have criticized the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Shariah. This global Muslim opposition to the law underlines that the Taliban’s position is not only out of step with Islamic jurisprudence but also threatens to isolate Afghanistan diplomatically.
Fearing potential unrest from both scholars and the general populace, the Taliban issued a statement on September 20 prohibiting religious scholars from engaging in controversial topics. This move suggests that the regime is acutely aware of growing dissatisfaction with its policies and is increasingly concerned about the possibility of dissent. By stifling debate on sensitive religious issues, the Taliban seeks to maintain control and prevent any challenges to their authority. This reflects a broader anxiety within the regime about the fragility of their power and the potential for public outcry against their governance. Such measures indicate a recognition that discontent is simmering beneath the surface, and the Taliban is eager to quash any emerging voices that could galvanize the population.
Recommendations to Safeguard Women’s Rights
As Haibatullah attempts to enforce the new vice and virtue law, the growing resistance is impossible to ignore. Besides the opposition from Afghan scholars, women and civil society are pushing back, both inside Afghanistan and in the diaspora, as they continue to fight for the rights and freedoms that were promised but never delivered. This week there were a slew of arrests of Afghan scholars who have been outspoken on women’s rights, including a prominent scholar who used to lead the Council for the Protection of Religious and Jihadi Values in Kabul. Afghan women have sent an official request to the OIC’s Fiqh Academy to issue a fatwa (a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious leader) against the Taliban’s misuse of Islamic sources, including the Quran and hadith, in this new vice and virtue law. In a brief response, the OIC said women have the right to education and to speak and be seen; it now has the opportunity to review the law and issue an official legal ruling condemning the Taliban’s misinterpretations.
Internationally recognized mechanisms, such as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan appointed by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, must be empowered to not only monitor human rights violations tied to the enforcement of this law but also impose consequences that are connected to economic outcomes, normalization and recognition as part of the U.N. Doha process. The U.N. Doha process on Afghanistan is a diplomatic initiative aimed at facilitating dialogue between the international community and the Taliban, focusing on securing peace, stability and the protection of human rights, including ensuring the Taliban’s compliance with international law. It seeks to address key issues such as governance, women’s rights and security in Afghanistan, with the ultimate goal of fostering an inclusive political solution. It will be essential to incorporate the monitoring mechanism of the special rapporteur into the U.N. Doha process as part of a formal mechanism to set milestones for Taliban compliance.
Internally, the Taliban face growing dissent over the law, offering a potential opportunity for the Taliban movement to be responsive to its constituencies and change leadership. By supporting more responsive moderate elements within the Taliban, such as those already questioning the law’s necessity, a reorganization of leadership (or recognition of local leadership) in the regime could frame a retreat as aligning with Islamic jurisprudence and local oversight. This internal pushback could provide a way for the Taliban to back down without appearing to surrender to external pressure beyond the Taliban movement, opening the door for broader reforms.
By maintaining pressure on the Taliban and supporting the growing internal and external resistance to their regime, the international community can help safeguard the rights of Afghan women and prevent further erosion of human rights in the country.
Mohammad Osman Tariq is an Afghan religious scholar who has written about religious institution building in Afghanistan. He is also a senior advisor to the Religion and Inclusive Societies program at USIP.
Religious Leaders, Civil Society Oppose Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Law
The government of Afghanistan has been warned that its violations of women’s rights will trigger a referral to the United Nation’s highest court – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – unless it changes its policies. The initiative, taken by Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands and supported by 22 other states, centres on alleged violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to which Afghanistan is a signatory. According to the procedures of the court, the Afghan government is offered a chance to resolve the dispute, failing which, the ICJ will take up the case. A spokesman for the Islamic Emirate immediately dismissed the allegations. While the court lacks enforcement power, it is not without teeth and a judgement against the IEA could lead to additional sanctions against the Emirate, as well as political pressure on those actors inclined towards normalisation. Rachel Reid provides an overview of the process, its potential impact and pitfalls.The move to take Afghanistan to the ICJ could be groundbreaking: CEDAW has been in place for more than 40 years, but never before has the court been asked to look into a state’s alleged breach of it.[1] The initiative was announced by four foreign ministers at a side event at the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2024 in an emotional speech from the German minister, Annalena Baerbock, who described the restrictions on Afghan women and girls.
You are not allowed to go to high school. You are not allowed to do sports. You are not allowed to travel. You are not allowed to work. To take the bus. To speak to a man or boy. To see a doctor on your own. It sounds like prison. But this has been the reality for women and girls in Afghanistan since 2021. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are removing every last shred of freedom from women and girls. And now, they have even banned women from speaking in public. In German, we have an expression for that: ‘mundtot’. It literally means mouth-dead. To kill someone, by killing their voice. That’s what is happening right now.[2]
In announcing their initiative, the four states accused the Afghan government of being responsible for “systematic gender discrimination,” as outlined here on the website of the Australian Foreign Ministry. It listed a broad range of restrictions: “Afghan women and girls are being socially, politically, economically and legally marginalized. The recently enacted so-called ‘vice and virtue’ law seeks to silence half the population and erase women and girls from public life.”
The four countries involved – Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands – have effectively put the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) on notice that they intend to pursue legal proceedings at the ICJ, if it does not change its policies. In a statement published by the Australian government, they called upon “Afghanistan and the Taliban de facto authorities” to cease their violations of the human rights of women and girls and “to answer to the request for dialogue to address the concerns of the International Community on this matter,” including recommendations made through the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process.[3] In addition to their side event in New York and media statements, AAN understands that a formal notification has been given to IEA officials.
There was a characteristic dismissal of accusations of discrimination by IEA officials, here in a tweet from deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat:
The Afghanistan Islamic Emirate is blamed for violation of human rights and gender apartheid by some countries and factions. Human rights are protected in Afghanistan and no one is discriminated against. Unfortunately, efforts are ongoing to spread propaganda against Afghanistan on the say-so of a number of women to make the situation look bad.
IEA leaders are consistently proud of their policies on women. In his Eid al-Adha message in June 2023, for example, Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada said (as reported by AP):
The status of women as a free and dignified human being has been restored and all institutions have been obliged to help women in securing marriage, inheritance and other rights.
Given the Emirate’s stance that what others see as restrictions on women’s freedoms and behaviour are in accordance with divine law and, anyway, are a domestic matter that other countries have no right to interfere in, it seems all but inevitable that the ICJ will eventually take up the case. Should that happen, it would be the first time any country has been summoned to the court for discrimination against women.
How does the ICJ work?
The International Court of Justice, often called the ‘World Court’, is the judicial arm of the United Nations. It settles legal disputes between states in accordance with international law, as well as providing advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by UN organs and agencies. Countries can file a case with the ICJ against another signatory country, which will be reviewed by its 15 judges, who come from all over the world. Decisions are binding, but the court lacks its own enforcement power – more on that later. Confusingly, the ICJ is based in The Hague in the Netherlands, which is also home to the International Criminal Court (ICC), an entirely separate court that addresses war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by individuals, not states.
The ICJ initiative focuses on violations under CEDAW – effectively a bill of rights for women – to which Afghanistan became a party in 2003. Conventions are signed by countries, not governments, so they remain in force regardless of changes in government. So, although the Emirate will no doubt question the jurisdiction of CEDAW, it remains bound by it under international law. Noticeably, none of the countries taking this initiative addressed the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ in their statements, choosing instead to refer to the ‘de facto authorities’ or the Taleban. They also sought to underline, in the words of the German foreign minister in the statement cited previously:
[B]y doing this, we are not politically recognising the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. However, we stress that the de facto authorities are responsible for upholding and fulfilling Afghanistan’s obligations under international law.
The possibility that taking the IEA to the ICJ might contribute to its de facto recognition was a concern raised by women in consultations held over the past two years (such as one organised by the Afghanistan Human Rights Coordination Mechanism in January 2024, attended by the author). Parwana Ibrahimkhail Nijrabi, one of the women who led protests in Afghanistan after the fall of the Islamic Republic, who is now in exile, told AAN: “The ICJ initiative is a valuable and important effort, provided it does not result in the recognition of the Taleban.” Nijrabi adds: “In any process related to this initiative, it is essential that women, who have been victims of the Taliban’s crimes, are given an active and meaningful role.”
For Afghanistan’s rulers, however, it will undoubtedly seem unfair that they are bound by a treaty they did not sign, particularly when the complainant states do not recognise the Emirate as Afghanistan’s government. It puts the IEA in a bind: without recognition, it cannot represent the state of Afghanistan in order to withdraw or apply reservations to international conventions. At the same time, in order to receive recognition, it is possible that, among other things, it would need to stop violating CEDAW.
The IEA may, however, find some sympathy among some Muslim nations, some of whom have chosen not to ratify CEDAW, while others have done so with reservations (in an analysis of CEDAW in the Middle East and North Africa by Amnesty International in 2021, of the 14 signatories from the region, eight had registered reservations in the light of what they saw as parts that were incompatible with sharia law).[4] When the Interim Afghan Government ratified the treaty in 2003, it was the first Muslim country to do so (rather “unexpectedly” according to this academic review, CEDAW and Afghanistan, which notes a context in which the new government was under pressure to demonstrate a commitment to gender equality). It is also striking that the United States itself has never ratified CEDAW, on grounds that the IEA would sympathise with – legal sovereignty, interlaced with some conservative ‘family values’ (summed up in this Heinrich Böll article ‘CEDAW and the USA: When Belief in Exceptionalism Becomes Exemptionalism’).
How long could legal proceedings take?
There are two stages before the court could step in: negotiation and arbitration, as laid out in Article 29 of the Convention. The IEA has been notified and invited to resolve the alleged breaches of CEDAW and now there needs to be signs of a “genuine attempt” to resolve the situation through negotiation. No time period is stipulated for this stage.[5] The second stage, arbitration, has a six-month window. If the Emirate fails to respond, or arbitration cannot resolve the dispute, the case would go in front of the court.
Once a case reaches the court, final rulings can take years.[6] However, interim decisions, or ‘provisional measures’, can be issued within weeks or months. For example, in a case filed by South Africa on 29 December 2023 against Israel, which it accused of violating the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip, the ICJ issued provisional measures within 28 days. It is likely that the four countries in the Afghan case would request provisional measures when filing a complaint against the Emirate.
What impact can the court have?
The ICJ is limited to issuing orders, such as instructing compliance with international obligations.[7] For the most part, states adhere to ICJ rulings, although there are plenty of examples of states ignoring them.[8] Instructing compliance might seem a relatively benign prospect for the IEA, which is accustomed to being chastised for breaches of international law. However, the ICJ’s orders are legally binding and failure to comply could result in a referral to other UN entities, most significantly the Security Council.
The politics of the Security Council are never straightforward. There are no guarantees that it would back up the court to enforce measures against the IEA. Not only is the US a CEDAW abstainer, but another permanent member, China, has not agreed to CEDAW’s article 29, the provision that allows for the court to step in when states have a CEDAW dispute.
That said, a number of IEA officials are already subject to Security Council sanctions, so it is possible for additional sanctions and/or oversight mechanisms to be imposed. This is where the potential teeth of this initiative start to be seen – the Emirate would like travel bans eased, not further sanctions imposed. It also wants UN recognition with all that flows from it, including taking Afghanistan’s seat at the UN General Assembly and having its diplomats recognised in capitals around the world. Even provisional measures from the ICJ could therefore pose an impediment to Emirate ambitions.
The other way that the ICJ has an impact is on the behaviour of other states. The furore that surrounded another ICJ examination – relating to Israel and its occupation of Palestine (further to this request from the UN General Assembly in 2022) – shows the potential ramifications of the court’s involvement. The court ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s long-term occupation of Palestinian territory was “unlawful” and amounted to de facto annexation, adding that Israel was in violation of the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.
Israel itself has ignored the court, accusing it of antisemitism (see this statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), but the court ruling has ramifications for other states that could result in sanctions, arms embargoes, as well as other diplomatic and economic relations. There had been previous calls from the Human Rights Council and UN experts for an arms embargo on Israel, which had gone unheeded. But by finding that Israel violated human rights protections against apartheid, the ICJ put pressure not only on Israel but, as the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan stated: “The court has placed responsibility with all states and the United Nations to end these violations of international law.” This includes those that are signatories to the UN Arms Trade Treaty and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. How an ICJ ruling could put pressure on states to act is explored in this opinion piece, ‘Why ICJ ruling against Israel’s settlement policies will be hard to ignore’ and this statement calling on other states to take action made by UN experts. In another case brought before the ICJ by Nicaragua, which aimed to stop German arms sales to Israel, the court chose in February 2024 not to issue provisional measures (finding that German arms sales had, in fact, decreased), but the judges did not dismiss the case and it seems that Germany may, in response, have halted arms sales.[9] A host of other legal efforts to stop arms exports to Israel are underway, all of which will be strengthened by the ICJ’s ruling.[10]
The ripple effect of an ICJ ruling – or even provisional measures – should, at least, give the IEA pause. If the IEA was found to be in breach of CEDAW, a strong court ruling or measure might have ramifications for how countries around the world and international organisations interact with it.
Who is behind the initiative
While Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands took the limelight when this move was announced, the initiative was the culmination of almost three years of advocacy by Afghan and international women’s rights defenders, which included identifying countries willing to lodge a complaint before the court.[11] The Open Society Justice Initiative has worked behind the scenes on this initiative for three years (as stated in this tweet), including providing this useful briefing on the process and hosting consultations with Afghan women. Among Afghan supporters, Shaharzad Akbar, Executive Director of Rawadari and former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), told AAN she hopes that “finally women in Afghanistan might see they are not forgotten.” Shukria Barakzai, former member of parliament and ambassador to Norway, is a co-founder of the Afghanistan Women’s Coalition for Justice, which has been engaged in advocacy on a range of justice initiatives, including supporting the ICJ route. Barakzai told AAN that “even with this simple announcement, it shows the Taliban they will be held to some kind of accountability.”
The countries bringing the complaint to the ICJ, however, are less than ideal for some advocates. All four states sponsoring the initiative previously backed the Islamic Republic and had troops on the ground in Afghanistan; the IEA will see them as inherently hostile actors. Moreover, although the German Foreign Ministry claimed its “partners” included “those from the Islamic world,” the list of 22 states supporting the initiative had only one Muslim majority country – Morocco.[12] Given the Emirate asserts that its policies on women and girls are ordained by sharia, this is not ideal. Finally, as noted above, Germany itself has been involved in a fraught wrangle at the ICJ over its close relationship with Israel despite that state’s violations of Palestinian rights, which undermines its legitimacy – both in terms of upholding international human rights law and in leading a legal action that will take on the IEA’s interpretation of divine law. Barakzai says this baggage was a real concern for the Afghanistan Women’s Coalition for Justice, but that they are trying to win more support from Muslim states, prominent Islamic scholars and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Other legal avenues being pursued
The ICJ is not the only proposal using international law to challenge the Emirate on its policies on women and girls. In February 2023, the Special Rapporteur, Richard Bennett asked the International Criminal Court to consider the crime of gender persecution in its Afghanistan investigation.[13] The ICC has taken strides to improve its track record in investigating and prosecuting gender-based crimes in recent years and in December 2022, released a new policy on gender persecution, a year later releasing a revised policy on gender-based crimes.[14]
If this route were pursued, the case would be against individuals within the IEA leadership, not Afghanistan, as a state, in contrast to the ICJ initiative.[15] As yet, though, the ICC chief prosecutor has said little in public about his Afghanistan investigation, to the frustration of victims who have already suffered years of delay (the court began its preliminary examination of the Afghanistan situation in 2006, but was only finally authorised to investigate in 2022).[16] The prosecutor had already decided that he would only investigate alleged crimes by the Taleban and ISKP, ‘de-prioritising’ those allegedly perpetrated by former Republic forces, the international militaries or the CIA.
It is not known whether he has chosen to include the crime against humanity of gender persecution as part of his investigation. It could be that he has already requested authorisation from the judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber for arrest warrants for this crime. Warrants can be issued ‘under seal’ (that is, in secret) to increase the prospects of apprehending the suspects (although given travel bans and the limited movement of the IEA leadership, the chances of arresting individuals while they visit an ICC-friendly country are already slim). Or the court might decide, if it did indict, that it would be better to make the warrants public, with the hope of it having a deterrent effect upon the IEA to the benefit of Afghan women and girls.
Alongside the push for legal proceedings against the Emirate for gender discrimination through the ICJ and possibly the ICC, since March 2023, a group of prominent Afghan and Iranian human rights defenders have led a campaign to establish a new crime of ‘gender apartheid’. The international crime of apartheid is defined in the Rome Statute as “inhumane acts” committed “in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The new crime would broaden the definition of apartheid to include gender as well as racial hierarchies.
Creating new international crimes is not quick or straightforward, but one potential avenue for this is a new standalone treaty on Crimes Against Humanity (bringing it into line with treaties for war crimes and genocide). This process is creeping forward, but it has many obstacles – and years to go (see this article on ‘Adding Gender to Apartheid in International Law’).
Conclusion
In the short term, the women and girls of Afghanistan cannot expect any immediate benefits from the ICJ initiative, as the German Foreign Ministry acknowledged when making its announcement:
Making use of the possibilities of the women’s rights convention will not change the situation in Afghanistan today. But it gives the women of Afghanistan hope. We see you, we hear you. We speak for you when you are silenced.
The rights of Afghan women and girls have been mentioned constantly by diplomats and in international fora since the IEA returned to power in August 2021, with repeated demands to the Emirate to reverse their policies. Yet official edicts restricting women and girls have only tightened. Meanwhile, notes Akbar, “normalisation continues.” The initiative to take Afghanistan to the ICJ could “at the very least,” she says, “delay their recognition and normalisation.”
There is often a question among activists about whether yet more international pressure for women and girls might result in a perverse hardening of restrictions by the IEA. When asked if that was a risk, Barakzai took a breath. “Can they make it any worse? We can’t breathe oxygen directly. We can’t even laugh in our house with a loud voice. What is left to be worse?”
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process offers a periodic review of the human rights records of all UN Member States. On 29 April 2024, during the 46th session of the Human Rights Council, Afghanistan was presented with 243 recommendations from 70 states on a host of human rights issues, with many focused on the rights of women and girls. The outcome of the review can be downloaded here: ‘Universal Periodic Review – Afghanistan’, United Nations Human Rights Council.
See ‘How the Court Works’, International Court of Justice. See also: ‘Bringing a Case Before the International Court of Justice for the Rights of Afghan Women and Girls – Q & A Briefing,’ Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), April 2024. The OSJI briefing lays out the following possible actions: a formal declaration that Afghanistan has breached its obligations under CEDAW; an order for Afghanistan to perform its obligations under CEDAW; an order requiring Afghanistan to make assurances and guarantees that it will halt its violations of CEDAW; an order instructing Afghanistan to prevent the destruction and to ensure the preservation of evidence related to acts that violate CEDAW.
Nicaragua has also given notice of its intention to take the UK, Canada and the Netherlands to the court for their support to Israel. There are cases to try to stop arms exports also in domestic courts in the UK, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. See ‘More and more cases on war and genocide are being litigated at the ICJ,’ Chatham House, 4 September 2024.
↑11
The Open Society Justice Initiative’s Mariana Pena tweeted on the day of the announcement, “Together with Afghan partners, @OSFJustice has been researching and advocating for an ICJ case under CEDAW for the past three years.”
↑12
Albania, Andorra, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Finland, Honduras, Ireland, Iceland, Republic of Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malawi, Morocco, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden [see Baerbock Statement FN 2]. Albania was historically a Muslim majority state, but its most recent census showed that less than 50 per cent of the population identified as Muslim. ‘Albania’s Muslim population drops below 50% for first time in centuries,’ Turkey Today, June 28 2024.
The exit of the US forces and the Taliban’s subsequent takeover of Kabul in August 2021 has significantly reshaped the Afghanistan-Pakistan militant landscape, emboldening the Taliban’s allies and adversaries alike. Its ally, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan’s largest militant group, has experienced a strong resurgence, intensifying attacks against Pakistani security forces while also operating from its safe haven in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Despite the Islamic State in Khorasan province (ISKP) – IS’s Afghan affiliate – facing senior leadership losses from the Taliban’s aggressive crackdown, the group has waged a persistent and deadly insurgency against Taliban forces and Afghan minorities, mainly Shia Hazaras. Concurrently, it has also diversified and expanded its recruitment and media campaigns. The group’s superior external operations capabilities are evident in its involvement in recent terror attacks across Russia, Iran, and Turkey, as well as recent terror plots in Europe, reflecting ISKP’s growing transnational threat.
Simultaneously, ISKP has also stepped up its constant flow of anti-Taliban propaganda campaigns through its mouthpiece, Al Azaim-media foundation, to undermine the Taliban’s governing credentials and religious authority. Specifically criticising the Taliban’s dealings with Western powers, ISKP argues that the Taliban’s actions are contrary to Islamic law. ISKP claims the Taliban has “abandoned the global jihad against infidel regimes” after being installed in power by Americans. The group further accuses the Taliban regime of serving as pawns of foreign powers like the US, Russia and China in return for international legitimacy and financial gain while ignoring the worldwide suffering of Muslims. Rooted in the ideological rift from the 1980s, ISKP, a Salafi jihadist group, accuses the Taliban of following the “highly flawed” Deobandi school of thought, labelling it as an apostate “Pashto-centric ethno-nationalist movement.”
However, in contrast to its aggressive posture toward the Afghan Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other jihadist groups, ISKP’s interactions with the TTP have been notably distinct. Although ISKP was born out of the disaffected TTP and Afghan Taliban members, it had, until last year, largely avoided physical confrontations and open hostilities in its media propaganda with the group. This is to deprive their common enemy, Pakistani security forces, of any strategic advantage, with both groups ostensibly having tactically co-operated in their areas of control in Pakistan.
Furthermore, ISKP’s criticism of the TTP was relatively less belligerent, with the TTP’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban not being overtly targeted in its polemical rhetoric. However, since June, ISKP has produced media products issuing ideological rebuttals to attack the TTP’s apostasy, which it believes stems from its deep historical and organisational ties with the Afghan Taliban. This Insight explores ISKP’s recent anti-TTP and Taliban narratives disseminated through its mouthpiece, Al Azaim Foundation, and similar criticisms raised by pro-ISKP supporters.
TTP’s primary media outlet, Umar Media, has also increased its output of sophisticated media productions over the past two years. It releases print and audiovisual material in Pashto, Urdu, English, and Dari, predominantly propagating a virulent anti-state narrative while largely avoiding overtly reproaching IS or ISKP.
ISKP’s recent anti-TTP discourse
At the end of May 2024, in a video shared on X, Qari Shoaib Bajauri, a senior ideologue and member of the TTP leadership council, rebuked ISKP as being composed of ‘extremist elements from the TTP’, al-Qaeda, and the Afghan Taliban. He stressed that the TTP has no affiliations or agreements with ISKP, but is, however, not at war with them. He stressed the TTP’s primary objective is to wage jihad against the Pakistani state and establish its control in Pakistan’s tribal areas where it can enforce its own interpretation of Shaira.
Following this, ISKP’s Al-Azaim media retaliated by releasing a 47-minute audio message in July titled “They Lost Their Credibility in Islam by Whitewashing Themselves to the Infidels.” In this rebuttal, ISKP decried the statement of the senior TTP leader and said that the TTP defectors who joined ISKP initially, such as ISKP’s founding leader Hafiz Saeed Khan, Gul Zaman Fateh, were “authentic mujahideen”, dismissing any ideological affinity and cooperation between both the groups. ISKP further slammed the TTP as a ‘tribal Deobandi local militia’ that restricts its fight within the borders of Pakistan, contrary to its global offensive jihad. Since 2018, TTP has emphasised that it doesn’t have any regional or global agenda beyond Pakistan.
Furthermore, in the audio recording, ISKP argued that the Taliban not only directs the TTP’s ideological stance, but also wields control over its operational trajectory in Pakistan. It further slammed the TTP as a proxy of pro-democratic forces and Pakistan’s Islamist political parties like Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazal (JUI-F), which has been regularly targeted by ISKP.
This later sparked similar discussions amongst pro-ISKP supporters on Telegram, who reiterated that the TTP has “strayed from its proper ideological path” following the killing of its leader, Hakeemullah Mehsud, in the US drone strike in 2013. Following his death, there were disputes over leadership succession, and TTP faced growing internal rifts, leading to the defection of its senior commanders, who went on to pledge allegiance to IS, subsequently forming ISKP in 2015.
ISKP supporters further contend that the Taliban regime “is desperate to establish official diplomatic ties” and curry favour with foreign states, mainly Pakistan and China, at the expense of TTP’s strategic interests. They allege the TTP has “allowed itself to be exploited by the Taliban regime,” which they claim has shielded Pakistan from TTP attacks and coerced TTP earlier into unsuccessful ceasefire negotiations with the Pakistani government. Further, in a book released in June 2024 discrediting the Taliban regime’s Islamic credentials (Figure 1), ISKP advised the “ignorant TTP leadership” to thoroughly study IS’s theological literature in depth to correct its theological beliefs that are dictated by the Afghan Taliban as shown in Figure 2. Yet, ISKP sympathisers argue that ISKP should avoid initiating hostilities unless provoked by the TTP and instead absorb its militants into ISKP’s ranks through proselytisation.
Figure 1: Cover page of ISKP’s book released by Al Azaim media foundation “TTP on the path of Taliban militia”
Figure 2: ISKP advises TTP to sever its ideological ties with the Taliban and instead adopt the Islamic State’s doctrine to rectify its beliefs.
Figure 3: Supporters in a pro-IS discussion room denounce TTP as a deviant group owing to its allegiance to the Afghan Taliban.
In a 71-minute audio released at the end of July, an ISKP ideologue rebuked former TTP deputy leader Sheikh Khalid Haqqani, who had questioned the legitimacy of the IS’s caliphate, arguing it lacked the essential conditions for establishing one due to a lack of expansive territorial control and disapproval from other jihadist groups and the Ummah (Muslim community). ISKP’s imam thus discredited Sheikh Khalid as an “uneducated mullah”, calling him a hypocrite and dismissing his criticisms as baseless.
The ISKP ideologue pointed out inconsistencies in the TTP’s own theological standards, questioning how the TTP could pledge allegiance to a “deviant” Taliban Emir Haibatullah Akhundzada, who only wields control over a “small corrupt emirate” in Afghanistan. He further asserted that the TTP’s scholars are attacking IS’s theological credentials to dissuade “believers” from joining its ranks. In recent issues of ISKP’s Pashto Voice of Khurasan magazine, denunciations of the TTP have become more nuanced. The TTP leadership is portrayed as prioritising worldly comforts over jihad, exploiting the religious sentiments of Pakistani youth to recruit them, appeasing foreign powers, and being backed by India.
In light of ISKP’s intensifying anti-TTP media offensive, it is notable that, unlike other jihadist groups that have overtly condemned IS and ISKP for their extremist violence, TTP leader Noor Wali Mehsud has shied away from declaring an official stance or openly denouncing ISKP. Meanwhile, the Taliban has aggressively countered ISKP’s hostile narratives through its Al Mirsad media website.
Conclusion
Despite frequent takedowns of ISKP’s official and supporter accounts on its digital lifeline Telegram, the group has become adept at evading moderation, continuing to produce and disseminate a steady stream of content in multiple languages, allowing the rapid circulation of its media propaganda, attack claims also running crowdfunding donations for their activities.
TTP and its supporter communities have primarily relied on Telegram and WhatsApp, to disseminate their propaganda, political commentaries, regional security developments and attack claims. Unlike IS and other extremist groups like Al Qaeda, as per the authors’ monitoring, TTP’s Umar Media and its supporter networks have faced fewer digital crackdowns on Telegram and other social media platforms.
This can be attributed to global intelligence agencies like Europol and tech companies prioritising the fight against more lethal global terror groups such as IS, Al-Qaeda and their affiliates, both on the battlefield and in the digital realm. As a result, terror groups with a local or regional focus, like the TTP, have been able to slip through the cracks to operate with relative freedom on Telegram. The TTP’s Umar Media, and other supporter TTP media channels with hundreds of subscribers and discussion groups on Telegram have been operating without interruption or bans for over a year. TTP media propagandists have also openly solicited donations for the organisation on Telegram, raising growing concerns about the platform’s enforcement of its content moderation policies. This comes at a time when Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, is already facing intense legal scrutiny for his application’s role in hosting and facilitating the spread of illicit content, such as child pornography and extremist propaganda.
Figure 4: TTP media propagandists posted a plea for donations for the organisation on Telegram.
In conclusion, tech companies should prioritise developing advanced AI detection systems to detect the unique propaganda tactics these groups employ, such as regional languages, dialects and coded language. Additionally, forming region-specific monitoring teams with expertise in militancy and security issues coupled with knowledge of local languages and cultures can enhance the effectiveness of content moderation. Finally, establishing stronger cross-platform coordination can prevent extremist groups from easily migrating their media content to other platforms.
Meanwhile, the online feud between ISKP and TTP has the potential to turn into violent confrontations, potentially benefiting Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts. To bolster their operational strength and longevity, TTP and ISKP have opportunistically forged strategic alliances and mergers with other like-minded groups operating in Pakistan’s newly merged districts bordering Afghanistan. TTP and ISKP have also, on multiple occasions, claimed responsibility for the same attacks, further reflecting growing competition amongst the groups for influence and recruits. Thus, the fluid militant landscape in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, marked by shifting alliances and deepening rivalries among insurgent groups, presents a formidable challenge to Pakistani and regional counter-terrorism agencies. This necessitates a rigorous monitoring of their operations and media propaganda to counter the growing terror threat from these groups.
TTP’s Alliance with the Afghan Taliban: In ISKP’s Crosshairs
A new book recovers the intellectual contribution of Haitian revolutionaries to ideas of freedom, equality, and sovereignty in the Atlantic World.
The cover of “Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution” by Marlene L. Daut. (UNC Press, 2023)
“Envision your cities shrouded in mourning… envision the care you took upon yourself, night and day, to revive your companions, envision your children, your soldiers, the peaceful inhabitants of the countryside crippled by the French,” wrote Louis- Felix Boisrond-Tonnerre, an early 19th-century Haitian thinker and former secretary to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, as he urged Haitians’ to remember their shared experience of the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution.
The gravity of the Haitian Revolution is incessantly muffled by constant news coverage spotlighting an impoverished Haiti while also criticizing its functionality as a free state. As a consequence, our shared memory of Haiti has forgotten the radical changes the Haitian Revolution and a sovereign Haiti brought to our modern world. Late 18th and early 19th-century Haitian thinkers, like Boisrond-Tonnerre, subjected to and shaped by the institution of enslavement, most certainly did not forget. Marlene L. Daut examines this collective remembrance in her book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. A book overflowing with the words of Haitian thinkers like Baron De Vastey, who knew not only the power of remembering their ancestral past but the significance of committing it to paper.
Today, as Haiti’s civil unrest dominates public media, it is hard to fathom that “Haiti” and “radical change” once existed in the same sentence. A Haiti free of disaster and political instability appears far from public imagination as conversations surrounding another military occupation emerge. For many years, the Western World has been fixated on how it can “fix” Haiti, ignoring its own responsibility for the country’s problems. As a Haitian-American and scholar of Haitian history, I find myself presented with the question “What is wrong with Haiti?” in conversations regarding Haiti’s history or its present situation. These conversations usually end with me, a spirited junior scholar, sharing a bullet point list with extensive verbal footnotes, of all the reasons why this line of questioning is problematic. “Fixing” Haiti has led to U.S. military occupations, economic stagnation, extraction, a large Haitian departure from the island, and a dismissal of Haitians’ intellectual contributions to our current world. It was the work of pioneering Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir, followed by scholars including Brandon Byrd, Chelsea Steiber, and Mame-Fatou Niang, who engaged with his texts that taught me how global hegemonic structures oppressed Haitians and subverted Haiti’s sovereignty. Marlene Daut is one of these crucial scholars whose contagious passion for Haitian history fuels this groundbreaking account of Haitian intellectual history.
Haitian thinkers not only exhibited a commitment to freedom for all in Haiti but also pledged themselves to the formation of a historical narrative composed by Haitians concentrated on Black freedom and sovereignty.Awakening the Ashes tells the story of the Haitian Revolution through the commitments, arguments, and ideals of the Haitian revolutionaries themselves. According to Daut, Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, historians, and politicians utilized the long history of Saint Domingue as they advocated for freedom. A conscious consideration of colonization and Indigenous and African enslavement shaped their vision of a liberated Haiti. When Haiti achieved independence in 1804, Haitian thinkers not only exhibited a commitment to freedom for all in Haiti but also pledged themselves to the formation of a historical narrative composed by Haitians concentrated on Black freedom and sovereignty. This Haitian-made intellectual milieu is evident in the extensive spread of newspapers, books, and pamphlets circulated throughout Haiti and examined by Daut. Daut argues that it was this devotion to Haitian history that “justif[ied], defend[ed], [and made known] the existence of Haiti [to] a world of slavery and colonialism.”
The success of the Haitian Revolution influenced freedom movements in other regions, including Guadeloupe and Jamaica. Haiti’s newfound independence also impacted the debates over slavery in the United States, France, and Britain during the 19th century. Daut reminds readers of this fact and stresses how Haitian writers were dedicated to true definitions of liberty and basic human rights. They aimed to create a country and history devoted in both action and word to freedom for all.
Furthermore, Awakening the Ashes addresses a gap in current North Atlantic scholarship that continues “to silence the influence of Haitian thinkers, writers, and politicians on [developing] Western intellectual practices.” Daut makes this claim clear in her introduction by examining Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s recently translated and republished Tidife boule, the first account of Haitian revolutionary history written entirely in Haitian Creole. She suggests that English-language Haitian historiography has privileged Trouillot’s Silencing the Past over Tidife boule. North Atlantic scholars have disregarded Haitian writers due to minimal engagement with Haiti’s languages. This lack of engagement has resulted in current practices of “historical reading” that regard Haitians “as objects of study rather than producers of studies.”
The book consists of nine chapters split thematically into three parts to contribute to a Haitian-rooted storytelling of Haiti’s enslavement, colonialism, revolution, and state-making. Part I: Colonialism shows how Haitian intellectuals criticized Indigenous decimation, enslavement, and the development of color prejudice in Haiti. In this section, Daut exhibits how “Haitian authors developed a series of historical and political inquiries designed to disrupt the idea that colonialism was a harmless method of ‘settling’ the so-called new world.” This section relies heavily on the work of Haitian writers like Emile Nau, Baron de Vastey, and Julien Raymond to unsettle this ‘harmless’ notion of colonialism. Part II: Independence explores the Haitian Revolution’s process of decolonization and its impact on the transnational abolition of slavery and, most importantly, the potential global influence of the Haitian notion of liberty. Part III: Sovereignty explores Haiti’s journey towards state recognition by focusing on Haitian print culture like books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Post-revolutionary writing, according to Daut “provides distinct keys for understanding how sovereignty in Haiti unfolded (and eventually fell apart) in the nineteenth century after the Haitian Revolution.” It is in this section that we are able to view the Haitian response to Haiti’s “figurative and literal foreign occupation” as writers like Janvier and Delorme grappled with the threat of U.S. imperialism.
As a result, the book’s goal is to “go beyond simply mentioning Haiti ” in a larger historical narrative related to the Atlantic World in the post-revolutionary period. Instead, Daut aims to take Haiti’s liberation and intellectual history seriously. Haitian “anti-racist, antislavery, and anti-colonial revolutionary thought” is proven to not only exist but to have had a broader impact on the development of 19th-century global ideals of freedom. Specifically, the global centrality of Haitian thought is demonstrated through Daut’s examination of Haitian print material from writers like Toussaint Louverture, Louis Joseph Janvier, Julien Raimond, Herard Dumesle, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, and more. These writers, poets, and politicians provide additional Haitian literary accounts of the island’s colonization, enslavement, revolution, and statehood. These accounts do not just recount violent events but theorize the need to upend existing structures of colonial power to communicate ideas of racism, class, and decolonization. Daut brilliantly locates how Haitian writers described white supremacy in terms of racial class distinction and opposition to imperialism in the Haitian revolutionary period, developing what she terms “the 1804 Principle.”
The 1804 Principle embodies the rejection of colonialism and enslavement. Daut argues that the “modern understanding of freedom and equality in operation today… stems more acutely from Haitian revolutionary thought” than from the American or French revolution, despite popular perceptions to the contrary. Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence created a “commonsense understanding” that slavery and imperialism were “incompatible with liberty.” Furthermore, the Haitian writers’ rhetoric during and after the Haitian Revolution created the foundation for “antislavery, and anti-racist ideas in the modern political grammar of Western philosophy.” Daut redefines intellectual history by focusing on a “history of ideas that regards both act and actes [deed and discourse] as intellectual.” The book considers both Haitian action and postulation as intellectual history because, according to Daut, revolutionary action is evidence of anti-colonial and anti-racist thought.
Daut has laid the groundwork for future scholars to examine the intellectual work of Haiti’s broader population who do not fully identify socially with prominent Haitian political figures.In Awakening the Ashes, Daut has produced an intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution that will inform the research of future scholars and graduate students. It is worth noting, however, that the writings of elite individuals—with access to publishing and printing networks— have often shaped the field of intellectual history. Consequently, by centering her analysis on the work of early Haitian writers who served as government officials or in other positions of political influence, Daut tends to favor the writing of Haiti’s formative, predominantly male, elite class. In doing so, Daut has laid the groundwork for future scholars to examine the intellectual work of Haiti’s broader population who do not fully identify socially with prominent Haitian political figures.
Awakening the Ashes is a significant advancement in Haitian scholarship that emphasizes the importance of Haitian history curated by Haitian minds. It is a call for scholars of the field to take Haitians seriously as thinkers, theorists, and historians by learning their language, culture, and dedicating the time to allow their words to inform new scholarships. Most of all, Daut invites readers to “awaken the ashes of the ‘numerous [Haitian] victims’ whom enslavers, colonists, and neo-colonists have sought to conceal, to ensure that we never forget.”
Rebeca Joy Blemur is a doctoral student in History at Baylor University.
Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (Review)
It is almost a year since, on 3 October 2023, Pakistan’s Prime Minister announced its decision to enact the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan. Since then, more than 700,000 Afghans have returned to their homeland. These returns were not voluntary. Some Afghans were deported, while others fled in fear of arrest and expulsion. Some, born in Pakistan, had never before set foot on Afghan soil. AAN’s Ali Mohammad Sabawoon has spoken to five returnees in different provinces and, together with AAN’s Jelena Bjelica, explores how they have been managing this utter upturning of their lives.
I returned from Pakistan around a year ago. I was the only one in my family without a Proof of Registration card. I was afraid the Pakistani police would arrest and deport me to Afghanistan and that my family would remain in Pakistan. I didn’t even dare to travel to the city. Finally, I decided to return with my family to Afghanistan.
Gul Muhammad, from Balkh province, is one of five returnees from different provinces whom we interviewed about their experience, having lived for most of their lives in Pakistan, of returning to Afghanistan and how they have been managing their lives, families, finances and the schooling of their children. They were among more than 722,000 Afghans who returned to Afghanistan between 15 September 2023 and 16 September 2024, according to the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) latest count, released in mid-September 2024. Out of this number, 33,400 were deported.[1] In this report, we speak about ‘returnees’, but, of course, many of those crossing into Afghanistan have never set foot on Afghan soil before. Born and brought up in Pakistan, the children or grandchildren of refugees, for some, this was their first time in Afghanistan.
According to UNHCR’s figures from March 2024 (see figure 1 below), there are about three million Afghans living in Pakistan; that is about a tenth of the 30 million Afghans who have ever lived as refugees there. Millions of Afghans fled east in the 1980s and 1990s to find safety during the various phases of the war in Afghanistan, the occupations and general turmoil. Most have since returned. Voluntary repatriations began as early as the late 1980s and included the mass repatriation that took place during the Islamic Republic in the early years of Hamid Karzai’s rule, incentivised by international donors and UNHCR and promoted as evidence of the success of the Islamic Republic ‘project’. However, there have also been deportations, including the mass forced returns of 2016 and 2017.[2] Over the years, many Afghans have also re-migrated to Pakistan. The most recent large outflux was after the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) when, according to Pakistani government figures reported to UNHCR, 600,000 Afghans crossed into Pakistan in the 17 months from August 2021 to 31 January 2023.
The three million Afghans now living in Pakistan are divided into three categories, as per their registration status (see figure 1 below): holders of Proof of Registration cards (PoR), jointly issued by UNHCR and the Pakistani government since 2006;[3] holders of Afghan Citizen Cards (ACC), issued by the Pakistani government since 2017;[4] and undocumented Afghan refugees.[5] What documents individuals hold – or do not hold – in Pakistan also affects the amount of support given by UN agencies if they return to Afghanistan: UNHCR only looks after the PoR card-holders, and supports any returning voluntarily, while the ACC holders and undocumented receive less substantial support by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
Figure 1: The approximate number of Afghans in Pakistan, broken down by their registration status. The number of undocumented Afghans includes those newly arrived between 2021 and 2023. UMRF refers to Unregistered Members of Registered Families. Source: UNHCR Situation report March 2024.
On 3 October 2023, Islamabad endorsed a plan to repatriate over a million foreigners, largely Afghans, who did not hold valid documents. The IEA urged Pakistan to hold off going ahead with the plan until the spring. In spite of these pleas, Islamabad gave a tight one-month deadline to the refugees to depart or it said it would forcibly deport them (see this UNHCR update and this Border Consortium update).
Almost two months later, at the end of November, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that Pakistani police and other officials were carrying out mass detentions of Afghans, seizing property and livestock and destroying identity documents in order to compel them to leave en masse. Around the same time, Islamabad decided that only those Afghans who held Pakistani visas would be allowed to enter Pakistan and that the Afghan ID card was no longer acceptable for any cross-border travellers any longer.[6] It called this “the first phase of refugees’ deportation.”
A UNHCR and IOMPakistan Flash Updatefrom 24 April 2024 found that most of those who returned (half a million at that point) were undocumented Afghans (89 per cent), followed by Proof of Registration holders (9 per cent) and Afghan Citizen Card holders (2 per cent). Among the deportees (around 30,000), 94 per cent were undocumented and 6 per cent had a Proof of Registration card. The most common reason given by undocumented and ACC holders for leaving Pakistan was fear of arrest (89 percent). “Returnees were most likely to return from Quetta (19 percent) and Peshawar (17 percent),” the report said, “and were most likely to go to Nangrahar (26 per cent), Kandahar (23 per cent) and Kabul (16 per cent).”
The returns continued into 2024, reaching their peak in May and June (38,000 returns in each of those months), the UN Agency for Refugees said. Finally, on 10 July 2024, ten days after the Proof of Registration cards, held by 1.45 million Afghan refugees, had expired, the Pakistan government approved a one-year extension (see Al Jazeera reporting). This granted the cardholders a stay until 30 June 2025.
Leaving Pakistan: Fear of deportation
Like Gul Muhammad from Balkh, whose words began this report, all our other interviewees – from Laghman, Kunduz, Kandahar and Helmand – left Pakistan because they feared being deported. All had been living in Pakistan since the 1980s and all returned to Afghanistan at some point during the last year. Two were registered refugees in Pakistan, with PoR cards, and three were unregistered, although Gul Muhammad’s family had been living in Pakistan for 37 years and he was the only unregistered member of his registered family.
Our interviewee from Kandahar province, father of eight, Hashim Khan, had lived in Pakistan for 43 years. He said he had returned because he was afraid he would be forcibly deported, despite the fact that he was registered in Pakistan and had a PoR card:
I returned now because I was afraid I’d be deported. There were families who had PoRs but were, nonetheless, deported. I was afraid that my family would be deported, and we’d also lose the money which the UNHCR gave us. … I don’t trust the Pakistani government. [However] they announced several times that after the deportation of the undocumented refugees, they’d turn to documented refugees.
He remembers the deportations of 2016/17, but said, then the Pakistani government was going only after individuals:
[At that time], they’d arrest individuals and deport them. The focus was on individuals, not entire families. There were people from our village who were arrested many times – they were jailed and then deported – but they actually had the chance to return to their families [in Pakistan] on the very same day. [For example], in 2017 a person from our village was arrested when he was travelling from a district to Quetta city. He was deported to Spin Boldak and delivered to the Afghan government, but the Pakistani police told him and other arrestees that they’d wait until they’d [the deportees] returned to Chaman and would then give them a lift back to Quetta, if they paid a bribe. I mean, the police were arresting and deporting people at different times, but it was not strict like it is now, that there wouldn’t be any way to cross the border back and the only option [once deported] is to stay in Afghanistan.
Hashim Khan was so afraid of deportation that he sold everything he had for half its value:
I had a cow which was worth 400,000 Pakistani Rupees (1,450 USD). I sold it for 200,000 Pakistani Rupees (720 USD). Everything lost its value and was worth practically nothing.
Helmandi Hashmat Khan, who has five children, had lived in Pakistan for 42 years and, like his countryman from Kandahar, had been registered in Pakistan. He said:
I came back from Pakistan last year on the brink of a harsh winter. I wasn’t deported. I willingly returned because I was hearing different kinds of rumours every other day. Sometimes they were saying that all refugees would be deported and sometimes that PoR holders would [be allowed to] stay. I was tired of hearing these rumours and, meanwhile, I was afraid of deportation.
The interviewee originally from Kunduz, who heads a household of 12, Khodaidad, had lived as an undocumented refugee in Pakistan for 38 years. He left after one of his sons was arrested by the Pakistani police:
Our family migrated to Pakistan 38 years ago because of the fighting. We returned once before to Afghanistan in 2017 and settled in Kabul. I bought a property in Kabul and built a house in Bagrami district because I didn’t have anything in Kunduz. We re-migrated to Pakistan again two months after the IEA takeover in 2021 because the economic situation didn’t look good. But last year, as the government of Pakistan turned harsher towards undocumented refugees, I packed up my belongings and told my son to rent a truck. He was arrested while searching for a rental track and kept in custody for two days and a night. I paid a bribe of 25,000 Pakistani Rupees (90 USD) to the police to get him released. As soon as he was free, we rented a truck and left Pakistan.
Laghmani Muhammed Ishaq was born in Pakistan and had lived his entire life as an unregistered refugee, making a living as a shopkeeper. He decided to return to Afghanistan with his wife and four children because his Pakistani friends and acquaintances were warning him that, this time, their government was serious about deportation.
My family migrated to Pakistan around 40 years ago. My father said that we migrated because of fighting in the country. I was born in Pakistan, but I don’t have refugee documents. Last year, I was so afraid the police would arrest me, I even didn’t dare go to my shop. I wasn’t deported, but I was sure that the police would deport me if they’d arrested me. We’ve been seeing and hearing of refugees being deported every day. I decided to return to my country. The government of Pakistan made the rules stricter many times during our presence in Pakistan in the past. But before, they only arrested people they found on the open roads between cities – they were not going after the shopkeepers or searching people’s houses. Even the Pakistani government officials that were customers in my vegetable shop, told me it is best to close the shop and leave. This is the first time I shifted my family to Afghanistan. I’d never tried before because I knew there is no job or house waiting for me and there was always the imminent risk of fighting.
Returning to Afghanistan: Where is home?
Housing and accommodation is a major problem for Afghan returnees. According to a December 2023 Save the Children survey of returnees, only a third had a place to return to,[7] with worse figures reported by UNHCR: they found only 17 per cent of returnees had no need of accommodation in their final destination. The majority of returnees do not own a property in their place of origin. Some had lost property due to neglect and the passage of time or in the destruction of war or it had been taken by cousins and nephews and land divided between multiple members of the family.[8] UNHCR found that, generally, those forced to return often chose not to live where they or their family were originally from because there were no job opportunities there or they did not have enough money to build a house.
Among our interviewees, just one had returned to his place of origin, two had returned to their province but not their district and two had headed elsewhere in the country. Possibly the most fortunate among the five was Khodaidad from Kunduz province, who has settled in Bagrami in Kabul province where he had bought land in 2017.He was the only one of our five interviewees who had a place to return to.
Muhammad Ishaq from Laghman province, by contrast, is now living with his wife and four children under the blue sky:
I don’t have a house to live in. A relative of ours has temporarily given me some land in the outskirts of the city. It’s walled land, but without a house. I’ve erected a tent, and we live in that tent.
He is not unusual. Nearly one in six returnee families are living in tents, according to the Save the Children survey.
Gul Muhammed from Balkh has rented a house, but said he can hardly afford to pay the rent and feed his six children:
I chose to settle in the provincial capital, Mazar-e Sharif for two reasons. First my home in our village was ruined in the fighting and I don’t have enough money to rebuild it. Second, I want my children to go to school. I’ve rented a house and pay 4,000 afghanis (55 USD) each month.
Hashim Khan, originally from Kandahar who returned from Quetta, told AAN he had neither house, nor land. He had rented a house in Daman district for 3,000 afghanis (40 USD) a month, but was struggling to pay the rent. He said he had heard the Islamic Emirate would provide housing for returnees, but “so far nobody has given me anything.”
The interviewee from Helmand, Hashmat Khan, has settled in Marja district of this province. Hebought a house with the money he had and spent more than half his savings to make it home. He is among the lucky minority who brought their assets back with them. Only a third of returnees had managed to do this, the Save the Children survey found, while 31 per cent of returnees (at the Spin Boldak crossing) and 12 per cent (at Torkham) indicated that their assets had been confiscated. “Most of the families,” said the report, had faced another hurdle: “[D]ue to their livelihood status, [they] did not have the means to transport their household assets back into Afghanistan and had opted to leave them behind or dispose of them.”
Feeding a family without a job
The lack of job opportunities, together with an insufficiency of aid, are two key difficulties facing returnees. Nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed by Save the Children said there were no jobs in Afghanistan, with 81 percent saying they did not have skills that could lead to employment.
Among our interviewees, only two have been lucky enough to find work – of a sort. Hashim Khan from Kandahar said he had managed to open a shop in a cabin (ghorfa) in the district where his family lived. However, his earnings could not meet the needs of his family:
I’ve rented a cabin for 2,500 afghanis (35 USD) and I’m selling spices there because I have experience in this. But I can’t earn enough money to feed my family. I earn 150-200 afghanis [2.5-3 USD] a day, which is hardly enough to pay the rent of the house and the cabin. We’re buying food with the money UNHCR gave us. But I still hope that my small initiative will flourish.
The returnee from Helmand province, Hashmat Khan has also managed to find a job for himself, but said it was not only dangerous but also did not earn him enough money to support his family well:
I don’t have that money to start a small business. The only skill I have is driving. I tried to find a driving job, but I couldn’t… I went to Spin Boldak to talk to the people who [illegally] traffic cars to Quetta. Sometimes, I find a car to drive it and take it to a district of Quetta. This is a very risky job because it is possible that I could be arrested and jailed or killed by the police of either country, while I try to escape from them and I still don’t make enough to feed my children. It is also hard and tiresome.
Gul Muhammad from Balkh province recalled how he lost his job in Pakistan:
I was a teacher in an NGO school in an Afghan refugees’ camp in Quetta. I was fired by the NGO because I didn’t have a PoR card. The NGO told me I should have PoR because my salary had to be transferred to the bank and for that, I had to have a bank account, and it wasn’t possible for a refugee to open a bank account without a PoR card.
He said that upon return to Afghanistan he could not find a job and that he had married off his 16-year-old daughter for her bride price:[9]
I tried to find a job but failed to do so. In searching for work, unfortunately, I had an accident. Both my feet and one arm were broken. I can’t work now,and my life was badly affected. I’ve installed a shop in a cabin in front of my house and my 13 years old son is running it. But this shop can’t feed our family. Finally, I was compelled to marry my 16-year-old daughter off to someone. I know how bad it is to give a daughter and take the money, but what could I do?
Khodaidad, from Kunduz, who now lives in Kabul, said three members of his household were in constant search for work, but could hardly ever find any:
Our household is badly affected economically. I had some money when returning from Pakistan and bought a rickshaw for one of my sons and thought it would earn us some money here. But it didn’t. Finally, I sold it for less than I’d bought it. My other son and I’ve been going to the square near us. Hundreds of men are waiting there for work, but there is no work for them. For the last twenty days, we’ve been going to the square but finding no job.
Khodaidad, like around 40 percent of returnees surveyed by Save the Children, had to borrow food or rely on friends and relatives. He said he had no other option but to take a loan from relatives in Pakistan:
We can hardly earn 200 afghanis (3 USD) a day, but we spend more than three times that, 600 afghanis (6 USD), every day. So far, I’m indebted to the tune of 100,000 afghanis (1,400 USD) to my relatives living in Pakistan. Each month, I ask them to send me a loan because I don’t have food for my family members to feed them.
The returnee from Laghman province, Muhammad Ishaq, is desperate because he is jobless and has to rely on his family:
There are no jobs at all. Sometimes my relatives help me and buy some flour and other food for me. My heart is bursting now. I don’t know what to do.
Unemployment and economic distress in Afghanistan have, on many occasions, compelled people, especially young men, to attempt to cross to Iran and Pakistan and take any odd job that might earn them a passage to Turkey, where they do the same until they might earn enough to pay to cross into Europe. This is why they often readily accept hard, even life-threatening jobs. The current conditions in Afghanistan might trigger some returnees to think about trying to make the perilous journey to Europe, either themselves or young men in the family, although typically money, in some form is needed[10] (for more, see this 2022 AAN report ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: No good options for Afghans travelling to and from Turkey’).
A joint initiative of the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the Asia Displacement Solution Platform (ADSP), which works to contribute to the development of comprehensive solutions for displaced populations across Asia, said in its May 2024 report:
Afghans are once again facing return to a context where conditions for sustainable reintegration are not met. Rights organisations have documented prior attempts to return Afghans, while research has shown that, if the causes of the initial departure remain unaddressed, returnees will probably leave again.
Deprived of education
While they were in Pakistan, Save the Children said, more than two-thirds of child returnees in the families surveyed had been going to school. That ratio is now reversed. Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) are now not going to school.[11] The majority (85 per cent) told Save the Children they did not have the necessary documents to register and enrol their children in Afghan schools. All our interviewees were also concerned that their children were being deprived of education, but blamed not lack of documents, but lack of schools. The sons of the interviewees in Balkh and Laghman were going to school, although their older daughters could not, while the returnees now in Kabul and Kandahar said there were not even nearby schools for their sons and younger girls. Hashmat Khan from Helmand also faced difficulties getting his only child of school age to school, but had managed to invest in transportation:
One of my sons was going to school in Pakistan. None of the others had reached school age. My son goes to school now as well. The school is around two kilometres away from my house. I bought a bicycle for him and he cycles to school every day.
Hashim Khan from Kandahar said that out of his eight children,
… four were going to school in Pakistan. My two elder daughters were in class eight and a son and one daughter were reading in class two. None of them go to school now because there’s no school in the village where I live. Even if there had been a school there or a high school for girls in the district centre, my older daughters couldn’t go because there’s a ban on girls’ schooling above class six.
Khodaidad, from Kunduz province, currently living in a village in Kabul, province had a similar story:
All my children – three sons and two daughters – were going to school in Pakistan. Two boys were in class four and one in class six and both my daughters were in class three. None of them go to school now because there aren’t any schools near our house. It’s a one-and-a-half-hour walk to reach the nearest school. We’d need to rent at least a rickshaw for them, if not a car. But we can’t afford either. We’re very unhappy to see them deprived of their education.
Gul Muhammad from Balkh province said he had chosen to settle in Mazar-e Sharif so that he could send his children to school, but the ban on girls’ schooling had dictated a different reality:
I didn’t return to my village, I chose to live in Mazar-e Sharif, instead. I thought my children would go to school. My eldest daughter had graduated from grade six in Pakistanand my sons and small daughters were in lower grades. My eldest daughter can’t continue [her education] because the IEA has banned girls [going to school] beyond grade six.
A morsel of aid
Upon arrival in Afghanistan, not all returnees are treated equally. Those with PoR cards who opted to return voluntarily receive a package of assistance from UNHCR. They are given one-off cash assistance of 375 USD per individual “to cover transportation and other immediate needs upon arrival” and each family should be granted 700 USD three months after arriving in their place of origin (see information about UNHCR’s care package here). Since 15 September 2023, some 109,700 individuals returning from Pakistan have been provided with cash assistance in Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad encashment centres, including over 69,500 PoR cardholders, the UNHCR reported in its 16 September 2024 update. However, undocumented returnees and ACC cardholders receive no assistance from UNHCR. They get more limited help, packages of food and non-food items, from IOM.
The Border Consortium, a collaborative initiative comprised of various humanitarian organizations aimed at addressing the needs of returnees and vulnerable populations in Afghanistan, particularly those returning from Pakistan, reported on 23 September 2024 that about 85 per cent of 553,4000 returnees had been assisted between 15 September 2023 and 30 June 2024 by different agencies. The Border Consortium report said that each returnee family received from the IEA government upon arrival a cash grant of 4,000 afghanis (60 USD) for families of two and up to 10,000 afghanis (140 USD) for families of five or larger and a sim card.[12]
Two of our interviewees, from Helmand and Kandahar and an interviewee from Balkh, who is an unregistered member of registered family, said they had received help from UNHCR on arrival into Afghanistan, but not yet the second amount of 700 USD which had been due in their area of origin after three months. For example, Kandahari Hashim Khan said:
A day after our arrival from Pakistan, I was provided with more than 2,600 USD by UNHCR [for his family of ten]. The IEA also granted me 10,000 afghanis (140 USD) and two free mobile SIM cards. I spent only one night in the waiting area, in a camp located in Takhta Pul district of Kandahar. After that, I came to Daman district of the province.
Our two other interviewees who were unregistered in Pakistan were assisted by IOM with food and non-food items when they arrived in Afghanistan and also said that, since then, they had received no aid. The returnee from Kunduz, who now lives in Kabul, said:
When our household arrived in Torkham, we were provided by the IEA with 30,000 afghanis (430 USD) for the whole household. As my two sons are married, they calculated us as three families, so they gave 10,000 afghanis (140 USD) to each family. They also gave us three cards, one for each family and told us that, with these cards, we’d receive food items for the first six months. After arriving in Kabul, we went to the Department of Refugees in Kabul and registered ourselves. But since then, we haven’t received any of the promised food items.
Muhammad Ishaq, the returnee from Laghman province, said that when he arrived in Nangrahar, the IEA gave him 20,000 afghanis (300 USD):
I was also provided with a food card, and told I’d receive rations for six months. They told me to keep the card on me. So far, I haven’t received anything, and the card has expired.
Afghan returnees from Pakistan, without question, are in a precarious situation, especially given that the whole country is struggling both with what the World Bank has called a “persistently stagnant” economy (AAN analysis here) and declining humanitarian aid. The Bank reported that the economy contracted by a quarter after the re-establishment of the Emirate. Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for 2024 has received only a quarter of the required 3.06 billion USD in funding, while the United Nations Strategic Framework for Afghanistan, 2023–2025, had, by August 2024 received only a third of the 2.9 billion USD required to meet the basic human needs of people in Afghanistan for 2024 (see the UN Security Council latest regular quarterly report on situation in Afghanistan, released on 9 September 2024).
Tough prospects
Being forced to uproot themselves, with little or no time to prepare, mostly unable to bring assets with them and not having a home or job to come back to – this is the uncertain and undesirable nature of ‘return’ for most Afghans arriving from Pakistan. Adding to this unappealing proposition is the difficulty of getting an education for their children, who are generally used to going to school; the boys and younger girls may get to school if there is one nearby, but older girls are now forced to sit at home. It comes as no surprise then that some returnees like Hashmat Khan from Helmand are venturing into illegal activities, such as vehicle smuggling, to try to scrape together a living. Most, however, still hope for some kind of help or financial aid that will help get them through this tough time.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, recently expressed his concern about “the challenges in scaling up capacities to absorb returnees and enable their sustainable reintegration,” a reason why, he said, “it is essential that the humanitarian appeal be funded sufficiently to help to address the immense needs of the Afghan people, particularly the most vulnerable.” The amount of humanitarian aid coming to Afghanistan, however, is in decline, while needs, are not.
These began after the December 2014 attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. The TTP had claimed responsibility, describing it as revenge for Operation Zarb-e Azb, the Pakistani military’s offensive in North Waziristan that had begun in summer 2014. However, as Human Rights Watch said in November 2015, hostility towards Afghan refugees increased sharply during this period. The report said that during the second half of 2016, over a million Afghans were returned from Pakistan, more than half of whom had been registered with the Pakistani government. “Many were compelled to return to Afghanistan at short notice after receiving 48-hours and/or a week’s notice to leave Pakistan,” the report said.
The UNHCR and the Pakistani National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) started the issuance of PoR cards for Afghan refugees in Pakistan in 2006. The PoRs expired several times, but were renewed or their duration extended via an announcement. A Pakistani English newspaper, The Balochistan Times, reported on 10 July 2024 that the government of Pakistan had granted a one-year extension to PoR cardholders (see here). Before this, in April 2024, PoR cardholders were given a two-month extension, which ended on 30 June 2024. There are around 1.3 million Afghan refugees with PoR card currently living in Pakistan.
↑4
Between August 2017 and February 2018, the Pakistan government itself started registering all undocumented Afghan refugees by issuing them with Afghan Citizen Cards. These were originally valid until October 2019. The ACCs were part of Pakistan’s ‘Comprehensive Policy on the Voluntary Repatriation and Management of Afghan Nationals’, which was adopted in February 2017 (see European Union Agency for Asylum report here). Around 800,000 Afghans have been issued with this type of card.
↑5
There are around 800,000 undocumented Afghan refugees in Pakistan, according to UNHCR-IOM flow monitoring. Their number fluctuates. In 2017, there were 600,000 to 700,000 undocumented refugees (see here). These are people who were unable to get PoR or ACC cards and live in constant fear of deportation, while also being unable to access basic services like health and education. They cannot get formal employment and work in them informal sector which makes them easy prey for manipulations and exploitations.
↑6
Before this, Afghan ID card (tazkira) holders from Afghanistan were allowed to commute through Spin Boldak. The visa system had already been imposed on the Torkham crossing point to Peshawar in 2014.
↑7
The Save the Children survey was published in April 2024 and was based on data collected from 485 returnee households and 240 households in host communities in Nangarhar (60 per cent of families surveyed), Kunar (22 per cent) and Laghman (18 per cent). A survey questionnaire and key informant interviews were used for the primary data collection in November 2023. 73 per cent of the respondents were male and 27 per cent female.
“During this assessment, the returnees were asked about the type of place they currently live in, with 38 per cent indicating they live in their own house, 36 per cent being hosted by relatives, 15 per cent living in an unsecured area in tents, 9 per cent living in rented houses, and one per cent mentioning another” (see page 10).
↑8
The Border Consortium update from September 2024 found that among those who have lived in Pakistan longer than a decade renting a house is more common. The report suggested that length of stay may have an impact on social relationships in the return country.
↑9
See this AAN report which heard from fathers who married off far younger daughters because of poverty or debt.
↑10
Afghans without visas trying to get to Iran have to pay money to smugglers. It is usually taken as a loan from compatriots who are already in Iran and then the travellers have to earn money to pay off the loan to their fellow Afghans.
Going to Pakistan without a visa did not use to need paid help from smugglers, or at least far less than going to Iran. However, these days, it costs around 5,000 afghanis (USD 70), including the rent of a vehicle, to get there especially if going from Helmand to Baluchistan province.
↑11
International NGOs have pointed out the education deficit facing returnees, for example, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said on 6 May 2024: “The recent forced return of over 540,000 Afghans from Pakistan has left thousands of children in need of educational support. Many of the returning children are now out of school. It’s hard for them to get an education in Afghanistan, where resources are already stretched thin.” (See NRC’s tweet here).
↑12
The IEA also promised housing and land for returnees. An IEA official said on 9 December 2023 that the IEA would distribute 200,000 places for shelters in different provinces to returnees who do not have shelters, Afghan news agency, Pajhwok reported. The report said that the families with less than ten members would receive ten biswas (1,250 square meters) of land, while families with more than ten members would be granted 15 biswas (1,900 square meters) of land. No media has reported actual IEA distribution to date.
However, on 10 July 2024, the spokesman of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, Abdul Mataleb Haqqani, told RTA that construction work was ongoing on 46 townships in 28 provinces for returnees and that when these were completed, shelters would be distributed to the returnees (see RTA report here).
Returning from Pakistan: How are Afghan returnees coping back in their homeland?
BY JAMES DURSO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR The Hill09/23/24 1:00 PM ET
Ahmad Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, recently declared he will defeat the Taliban “no matter the odds.”
For Massoud to mount a military threat to the Taliban, he would need the cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran or Pakistan (among others) to do the job. However, Afghanistan’s neighbors have no interest in another civil war in Afghanistan, as the violence and refugees would spill over their borders and cause economic dislocation and unrest all the way to Europe.
After two decades of U.S.-sponsored mayhem in the Hindu Kush, all the region wants is to recoup the missed opportunities of the “lost decades” of 2001-2021.
None of Afghanistan’s neighbors prefer the Taliban to any other group, and they object to the regime’s unrepresentative government and policies toward women. That said, their leaders must solve today’s problems despite their distaste for the Taliban’s retrograde ways.
The republics’ approach to Kabul has long been “neighbors forever” — or, for the pessimists, “captives of geography.” Kazakhstan removed the Taliban from its terrorist list in December 2023; Uzbekistan never declared the Taliban an extremist group, and in 2018 it publicly encouraged the Taliban to start negotiations with the Islamic Republic. Turkmenistan was mum on the topic of the Taliban in line with its policy of permanent neutrality. In September 2024, the chief of Tajikistan’s security service visited Kabul for talks that were described as “productive,” and the same month the Kyrgyz Republic removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organizations.
Afghanistan and its Central Asian neighbors are collaborating to ease trade and transport; renovate Afghanistan’s roads and railroads; help Afghanistan improve irrigation projects; ship natural gas from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India; build a railroad from Uzbekistan to Pakistan’s seaports; and build a multi-modal transport corridor from Kazakhstan to Pakistan, terminating in the United Arab Emirates.
Economic growth depends on an adequate supply of water; Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains form the headwaters of the region’s basins.
In March 2022, the Taliban launched construction of the 285-km Qosh Tepa canal, which will divert 10 billion cubic meters of water annually from the Amu Darya River, relied on by water-starved Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. They will suffer a 15 percent cut in the current supply. The project will cost $684 million, but it will irrigate 2100 square miles and create 250,000 jobs. Kabul feels it is critical to ensure food security for the emirate.
Tashkent and Ashgabat are unhappy with the project, but the Uzbeks offered technical assistance to Afghanistan to ensure the construction is “in accordance with international norms.” Now is a good time to consider inviting Afghanistan to join Central Asia’s regional water management organization, the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination of Central Asia.
Afghanistan also has unresolved water issues with Iran and Pakistan; those projects would be endangered, or further delayed, by a civil war.
According to the United Nations, there are now 7.6 million Afghans in Iran and Pakistan, most of them refugees. In 2023, Pakistan expelled over 540,000 Afghan refugees, and the next phase of the plan may see 800,000 more Afghans deported. Increased violence will likely reverse these flows and burden Iran and Pakistan, who cannot afford to support the refugees they have now.
China recently warned Pakistan it must get control of the violence that is endangering the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor . More violence north of the Durand Line will further delay the corridor, which may be seen as a strategic “win” in Washington but will hurt Central and South Asia.
In April 2022, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation and methamphetamine production. This benefits Iran, which has the highest rate of opium abusers in the world, according to the World Health Organization. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “More than 3,700 national law enforcement officials have been killed and over 12,000 have been maimed in counter-narcotics operations over the last three decades.”
That’s good news, but if Afghanistan must fund a war against groups like the National Resistance Front (and its foreign confederates), the ban on drugs may go by the wayside.
In fact, if the Taliban suspect a foreign hand in an attack, will it encourage al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to strike foreign targets? Sure, that will violate the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan, where the Taliban agreed “Afghan soil will not be used against the security of the United States and its allies,” but the Taliban will note the Americans pledged, “The United States and its allies will refrain from the threat or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan or intervening in its domestic affairs.”
Is the Taliban isolated? No, Seventeen countries, including every country that borders Afghanistan plus the European Union, maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul. Aaron Zelin reports “between August 2021 and February 22, 2024 the Taliban has publicly announced 1,382 diplomatic meetings with at least eighty countries.” China and the United Arab Emirates have accepted the credentials from Taliban ambassador to their capitals.
Pragmatism may be winning, regardless what governments or their citizens think of Taliban policies.
After Shohna ba Shohna(Shoulder to Shoulder) proved weak, it is time for the locals to lead, though Washington and Brussels can help by facilitating diplomatic and economic support of beneficial projects. The Americans, in particular, will need a broad aperture to understand the needs and opportunities of the region instead of obsessing about what might have been.
The defeat of the U.S. and NATO may have seen the end of the era of empires in Central Asia and Afghanistan, after the Russian Empire (1713-1917), the British interventions (1839-1919), the Soviet empire (1917-1991), and the American empire (2001-2021).
Some questionable characters will make a few bucks along the way, but that’s the price of repairing the damage caused by the crusade to reform Afghan culture as part of Washington’s post 9/11 war on terror, the “first grand global experiment of the twenty first century.”
James Durso is a regular commentator on foreign policy and national security matters. He served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Afghanistan’s neighbors don’t want another civil war
Afghanistan has a façade of domestic stability, with armed conflict decreasing since the U.S. withdrawal.
But dire economic, humanitarian and human rights conditions and Taliban violence build pressure on the population.
The international community remains vexed over how to engage the Taliban.
Lacking formal recognition from all member states, the Taliban will not be present at the U.N. General Assembly next week. Their absence speaks volumes about how the international community struggles to constrain a regime that has repeatedly defied U.N. treaties, sanctions and Security Council resolutions. Three years into Taliban rule, the Afghan people are beset by a host of human rights, economic and humanitarian challenges, with women and girls particularly impacted. Meanwhile, the international community still has no clear approach to dealing with the Taliban, with the regime rejecting a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a special envoy to develop a roadmap for normalizing Afghanistan’s relations with the international community.As world leaders prepare to gather and discuss the most difficult global problems, USIP’s Afghanistan experts examine the challenges of living in and engaging with Afghanistan under the Taliban and the implications of the present situation on moving forward.
How bad is the human rights situation, particularly regarding the Taliban’s approach to justice and civil liberties?
Belquis Ahmadi: Since taking control, the Taliban has issued over 100 decrees aimed at restricting the rights of women and girls to education, employment, healthcare and mobility, among other things. The Taliban’s latest vice and virtue law consolidates previous edicts and introduces harsher restrictions, including classifying a woman’s voice as awra — an intimate element that must not be heard publicly. The law marks a new phase in the Taliban’s systematic efforts to erase women from all aspects of Afghan society. If it is enforced, women will disappear from television and radio broadcasts, public employment and will be further restricted in getting an education.
Just as women’s fundamental rights are being eliminated, Afghans’ ability to seek justice has deeply eroded. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan’s justice system has been transformed from a system that, while imperfect, was grounded in the rule of law with civil society playing a crucial role in ensuring that decisions were consistent with the country’s legal framework, to one in which unqualified clerics can apply their own (mis)interpretations of Shariah. In one of their earliest actions after seizing power, the Taliban suspended the constitution, a document that, while recognizing the primacy of Shariah, also acknowledged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enshrined the principle of equal rights before the law for both men and women.
Just as women’s fundamental rights are being eliminated, Afghans’ ability to seek justice has deeply eroded.
The Taliban have taken further steps to dismantle the existing legal framework, including the suspension of the Afghanistan Independent Bars Association, a vital institution that once played a key role in safeguarding legal rights, ensuring access to justice, advocating for fair trials and providing legal representation to those in need. Male lawyers are now subjected to a religious knowledge assessment, and only those who meet the Taliban’s criteria and expectations have been relicensed. This shift has subordinated the legal profession to the Taliban’s ideological agenda. Meanwhile, female lawyers, judges, prosecutors and court clerks have been dismissed from their positions.The Taliban’s so-called justice often consists of swift, brutal punishments, frequently ordered by a single judge with unchecked power. Since taking control, hundreds of Afghan men and women have been subjected to public floggings, followed by imprisonment for up to two years. The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of force, where justice is not administered in courts but meted out through fear and violence.
Women face significant barriers in accessing justice, noted Richard Bennet, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, in a 2023 report. Obtaining legal aid and counseling is particularly challenging, as women often need to rely on a mahram (a male guardian) to access the courts. In some cases, the mahram may be the very reason the woman seeks justice, complicating the process further. The Taliban dismissal of female legal actors combined with restrictions on interactions between men and women, exacerbates these challenges and leaves women in a desperate situation.
How has the security situation evolved for Afghans over the last three years?
Joyana Richer and Jill Baggerman: Armed conflict has decreased now that the Taliban has ended its violent insurgency. Though threats of violence and terrorism remain, the Taliban can accurately demonstrate that large-scale violence is at its lowest level in decades. Afghanistan’s streets are clean and “safe” in some respects — as long as the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on women are heeded. Tourism is up and kidnappings are down.
However, the absence of armed conflict represents only a negative peace. Broader human security has decreased for much of the population due to increased poverty, hunger and the Taliban’s repression and structural violence. Human rights advocates, former government officials, and people who break the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law are subjected to extrajudicial killings, disappearances and floggings. The regime enforces it policies through fear, coercion and discrimination.
The current low level of violence shouldn’t be conflated with peace nor become a distraction from addressing remaining sources of conflict. Afghanistan’s history is marked by deep-seated grievances, cycles of revenge and resource disputes. The Taliban’s current approach to security suppresses these issues, but those long-standing divisions will persist until they are resolved in a way that meaningfully benefits all of Afghanistan’s diverse population. Throughout Afghan history, political exclusion has often led to armed resistance, frequently fueled by foreign patrons of different factions. Avoiding this cycle of repression and violence will require collaborative efforts between local communities and external actors, who could potentially leverage this stage of domestic physical safety to address long-standing root drivers of conflict.
What about the Afghan economy and humanitarian situation?
William Byrd: Over the past three years Afghanistan’s economy has gone through three phases, with a drastic initial economic shock stabilizing at a low-level equilibrium that shows little prospect of improving any time soon.
Free-fall in the months following the Taliban takeover, precipitated by the cut-off of some $8 billion per year of aid and large international military expenditures in-country, exacerbated by stoppage of foreign financial transactions, freezing of Afghanistan’s $9 billion of foreign exchange reserves, and other shocks. Afghanistan’s GDP fell by more than a quarter, unemployment and underemployment increased, inflation soared and personal incomes fell, with tens of millions of people dependent on humanitarian aid. The urban service sector (bloated by foreign inflows of money) shrank greatly. Afghan women suffered disproportionately due to Taliban gender restrictions. Rural areas saw improvements in security with the end of the war, but any economic “peace dividend” was overwhelmed by the aid cut-off and other shocks.
Subsequent stabilization of the economy at a low, arguably below-subsistence level supported by humanitarian support and better-than-expected Taliban economic management. Inflation fell back, poverty and unemployment seem to have stabilized albeit at high levels, the exchange rate improved, imports recovered, exports grew and revenues were effectively collected despite the weak economy. Humanitarian aid funding reached a peak of $3.8 billion in 2022, and associated U.N. shipments have in the past two and a half years injected $3.8 billion in cash into the economy. Human capital development, however, is being decimated by the prohibition against women and girls’ education and many boys dropping out to seek work.
Current economic stagnation with downside risks and little prospect for robust growth. Exports and revenues seem to have plateaued, and the World Bank projects limited growth in coming years. The Taliban’s opium ban has devastated millions of rural households previously dependent on poppy cultivation to make ends meet, while not stemming flows of opiates out of the country from existing inventories. Humanitarian aid funding was halved in 2023 (to $1.9 billion) and is unlikely to increase in 2024. Basic development assistance, perhaps amounting to several hundred million dollars per year, will not offset this decline. Moreover, development projects currently underway and envisioned will not contribute much to overall economic growth. Most of the projects, which could be labeled as either humanitarian or development, will require money on a recurrent, in many cases, yearly basis. So, there will be little or no reduction in aid dependency, and overall a bleak economic picture.
How does the international community see the Taliban’s rule three years on?
Baggerman: The international community lacks consensus on how to engage with the Taliban. No state has officially recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government. However, China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, multiple Arabian Gulf countries and a few others have cautiously moved toward a realpolitik acceptance of Taliban rule.
International actors’ core dilemma centers on principled versus pragmatic engagement. Many civil society groups and U.N. human rights bodies take a principled stance, focusing on promoting human rights, especially for women and girls. Pragmatic or tactical engagement — seen by the U.N.’s Doha meetings and humanitarian efforts — addresses immediate needs, but tends to normalize Taliban authority.
Most global engagement with the Taliban centers on counterterrorism. Taliban rule has created a safer haven for terrorist groups that threaten regional and international security. The Taliban has not expelled al-Qaida members, and ISIS-Khorasan (while opposed by the Taliban) has managed to secure a foothold in the country from where it has conducted recent attacks in Moscow and Iran. Pakistan is deeply threatened by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which the Taliban have given safe haven.
Overall, neither pragmatic nor principled approaches seem to have influenced senior Taliban policymaking in the last three years.
Regional nations take a pragmatic approach toward navigating shared challenges like border security, economic interdependencies and transboundary water challenges. Central Asian countries are apprehensive about infiltration by violent Islamic groups such as ISIS-K and ones with Central Asian roots but lack the power to change the Taliban and have thus resorted to policies of normalization and practical engagement. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have both removed the Taliban from terrorist lists. The region is enacting multiple deals that predated the Taliban takeover. For instance, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India energy transfer deal began in Afghanistan on September 11 and the Taliban’s construction on the Qush Tepa Canal deepen Central Asia’s engagement. Tajikistan has raised the most objections to accepting Taliban rule, but recent signals indicate this position may be veering toward normalization.Overall, neither pragmatic nor principled approaches seem to have influenced senior Taliban policymaking in the last three years.
What does this mean for U.S. policy?
Scott Worden: Afghanistan has largely disappeared from high-level foreign policy debates as more acute crises like Gaza and Sudan and more strategic challenges like China and Russia have come to the fore. Afghanistan has taken a back seat in U.S. foreign and defense policy and neither presidential campaign has put forward detailed policy proposals about how they plan to deal with the country’s challenges if elected. The current administration has also avoided significant discussion about Afghanistan policy beyond condemning women’s rights violations and noting the absence of terrorist attacks on the homeland despite having no troops on the ground. In the background of all this silence is an uncomfortable sense that there are few good ideas on how to change a frustrating and depressing status quo.
U.S. policy toward Afghanistan is also hampered by the same tensions between a principled vs. pragmatic engagement approach discussed above. On one hand, maintaining a functional relationship with the Taliban is needed to achieve core U.S. interests of counterterrorism cooperation on ISIS-K and individuals that have been wrongfully detained. On the other hand, the U.S. condemns the Taliban’s women’s rights restrictions and does not want to be seen as “rewarding” the Taliban for their authoritarian behavior. Economic assistance is caught in the middle. Sanctioning the Taliban and withholding development assistance is a normal response toward an adversarial regime — yet it ultimately hurts Afghans the U.S. wants to support and increases humanitarian needs. Essentially, the Taliban’s human rights violations provide a low ceiling for U.S. engagement and the need to mitigate terrorism and migration risks put a floor on the degree of isolation the U.S. can afford. Policy will likely fluctuate within this middle band for the foreseeable future unless and until some surprising security shock like a foreign terrorist attack jolts the system.
Where is Afghanistan Three Years into Taliban Rule?
The ICC case and Taliban policies reflect systematic efforts to oppress women.
The similarities between the two underscore a vital need for ICC intervention.
The ICC prosecution shows a clear legal approach to gender-based violence, unlike the inconsistent international response to the Taliban.
Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, the situation for Afghan women and girls has dramatically deteriorated. Yet there has been little international action, as many in the international community lament the lack of legal, and other, avenues to hold the Taliban accountable for these draconian measures. However, a recent case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) may provide a legal roadmap to prosecute the Taliban.On June 26, 2024, the ICC announced its judgment in the case of The Prosecutor v. Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud (the “Al Hassan case”), convicting the defendant, the head of Ansar Dine’s Islamic Police in Timbuktu, Mali, of crimes against humanity and war crimes. But the panel of judges found that while the crime against humanity of persecution on the basis of gender (hereinafter “gender persecution”) was ongoing at the time Al Hassan committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, criminal liability for the gender persecution did not attach to him.The court’s decision has been viewed with disappointment by many advocates for accountability for gender persecution and gender-based crimes, particularly advocates and women in Afghanistan who had eagerly awaited the decision to inform their efforts to seek accountability for Afghan women and girls. While Al Hassan was not convicted of the crime, the panel’s decision provides important indicators of what constitutes gender persecution, as well as instructive jurisprudence on potential opportunities and challenges in proving it.
The Crime of Gender Persecution
As defined by the Rome Statute of the ICC, persecution is “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.” Persecution rises to the level of a crime against humanity when committed on a widespread, systematic basis “against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender … or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any … crime within the jurisdiction of the [ICC].” Persecution therefore requires the commission of another crime outlined in the Rome Statute to be charged. Prior to the Al Hassan case, gender persecution had not been charged by the ICC prosecutor, although the Prosecutor’s Office had taken steps to further define the crime and its approach to the crime through policies on gender persecution and gender-based crimes.
The Al Hassan Case
The Al Hassan case considers the defendant’s conduct during Ansar Dine’s and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) 2012-2013 occupation of Timbuktu, Mali. Al Hassan was recruited by these groups to head the Islamic Police and was responsible for enforcing their restrictive interpretation of Shariah law. While these policies impacted the entire population, women and girls faced particularly severe restrictions, including requiring them to wear a veil and cover their bodies, constraining their ability to move freely, and subjecting them to forced marriages. Women were frequently beaten or detained for violations of these restrictions, in sharp contrast to men who were more likely to receive a warning. Female detainees were subjected to sexual assault, including gang rape.
Al Hassan surrendered to the ICC in March 2018 and was charged with crimes against humanity, including torture; other inhumane acts, among them forced marriage; persecution on the basis of religion and gender; and war crimes including torture, mutilation, and passing sentences without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court.
The ICC’s panel first considered whether the charged crimes had taken place under the Ansar Dine-AQIM occupation. The majority found that these groups committed persecution on the basis of religion and gender during the occupation of Timbuktu, intentionally and severely depriving the city’s population of fundamental rights, among them the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; the right to freedom of movement; and the right to freedom from discrimination based on gender. In finding that Ansar Dine/AQIM had committed persecution on the basis of gender, the panel noted that “specific rules and prohibitions were aimed at women and girls, and their violation was repressed with especially harsh punishment and detention conditions, involving gender-specific violence.” These specific rules were based on Ansar Dine/AQIM’s roles and expectations about the behavior of women.
The panel then turned to Al Hassan’s culpability. Al Hassan was found guilty of persecution on the basis of religion, among other crimes. However, he was acquitted of gender persecution, with all three judges taking different positions on his culpability. In separate and partially dissenting opinions, two of the judges considered the question of gender persecution, and their findings provide important, although less persuasive, precedent in future gender persecution cases.
Judge Kimberly Prost of Canada found that gender persecution had occurred for which Al Hassan was responsible and should be found guilty, and thus dissented from the majority’s acquittal. Judge Prost argued that gender persecution was fundamentally intertwined with religious persecution, and that “women and girls were not only particularly affected, but they were also specifically targeted on the basis of gender.” While Judge Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua of the Democratic Republic of Congo found that Ansar Dine/AQIM had committed gender persecution, he found Al Hassan not guilty of all charges by reason of duress and mistake of law. Judge Tomoko Akane of Japan, while also acquitting Al Hassan on the charge of gender persecution, dissented from the finding of judges Prost and Mindua that Ansar Dine/AQIM committed gender persecution, finding instead that none of the crimes against humanity committed met the “connection with” requirement for gender persecution and that the gender-based violence associated with the occupation was outside the common purpose of Ansar Dine/AQIM in occupying Timbuktu.
Applying Al Hassan to Afghanistan
The Al Hassan decision, while not the resounding victory advocates of gender persecution had hoped for, provides helpful insights into situations in which gender persecution is alleged, including Afghanistan. These insights relate to the rights violated by Taliban edicts and comments, the mechanisms for enforcement and patterns of punishment, the Rome Statute crimes committed “in connection with” gender persecution, the rejection of pre-existing discrimination on the basis of gender as a defense, and the potential need to overcome a “common purpose” challenge related to sexual and gender-based violence.
The Al Hassan decision provides helpful insights into situations in which gender persecution is alleged, including Afghanistan.
Taliban Edicts Amount to Severe Deprivation of the Fundamental Rights of Afghan Women and Girls
Taliban leaders have restricted the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan through a series of edicts designed to push women out of public spaces. As in Al Hassan, these edicts are based on a strict interpretation of Shariah law that defines what women “are suited for” within the Taliban’s vision of society. These restrictions undermine several fundamental rights under international law, including freedom of movement and association, and freedom from gender-based discrimination. The Taliban’s efforts differ from those of Ansar Dine/AQIM in the higher volume of edicts, which present an arguably more formalized attempt at repressing women on the basis of gender, and the expansiveness of the rights impacted. Repressive Taliban edicts include a harsh dress code forcing women to cover themselves entirely while in public and harsh limitation on the right to marriage, freedom of movement and association, and restrictions on access to education, employment, healthcare and cultural engagement. (For a comprehensive list of Taliban anti-women edicts, click the below infographic.)
Original artwork by Ahmad Fahim HakimFinally, as if the situation for women in Afghanistan was not already dire, a new vice and virtue law consolidates various previously issued edicts and instructions into a more rigid and comprehensive framework, adding several new restrictions. Among these, it now classifies a woman’s voice as “awra” — a private, intimate aspect that must be concealed from the public sphere, effectively silencing women from participating in any form of public discourse.
Similar Patterns of Punishment, and More Gender-Specific Enforcement Mechanisms
In the Al Hassandecision, the Court recognized a pattern of punishment for violations of Ansar Dine/AQIM edicts that was more severe for women than men as central to a finding that gender persecution occurred. This included corporal punishment and arbitrary detention in inhumane conditions, during which women were subjected to sexual assault. The Taliban has pursued a similar pattern of using more severe enforcement tactics, including corporal punishment and arbitrary detention, to implement edicts targeting women. A number of women have reported instances of sexual assault while in detention.
In addition, the Taliban has taken the additional step of creating specific enforcement mechanisms to police women’s compliance. The Ministry of Vice and Virtue created the female morality police in 2022 to “guide” women in following Taliban edicts. These police are thought to be stricter with women than their male counterparts. Men have been similarly empowered to enforce Taliban edicts within their families and communities, increasing the risk of violence against women.
Similar Rome Statute Crimes Committed in Connection with Gender Persecution
The crime of persecution can be charged only “in connection with” other crimes against humanity or crimes outlined within the Rome Statute. In the Al Hassan decision, the crimes against humanity charged that satisfied this requirement included torture and other inhumane acts, among others. The majority found that the existence of other ongoing Rome Statute crimes fulfilled the connection requirement. Further, while crimes considered to be part of the persecution charge had been committed, they were not necessary to fulfill the connection requirement. Similar crimes are ongoing in Afghanistan, stemming both from the Taliban’s treatment of women as well as their treatment of the population as a whole. Additional crimes against humanity alleged in Afghanistan include imprisonment, enforced disappearance and forced marriage. Given the majority’s ruling, these crimes would likely satisfy the connection requirement.
Pre-Existing Discrimination Against Women is not a Defense
A notable development from the Al Hassan decision is the court’s distinction between pre-existing discrimination against women and the systematic discrimination alleged as part of the crime of gender persecution. The panel dismissed a defense argument that the pre-existing levels of gender discrimination in Malian society should be considered in evaluating the extent of the discrimination emerging from the alleged gender persecution. This finding may be used to counter any potential defense argument surrounding the historical treatment of women in Afghanistan as a defense to the Taliban’s current treatment.
Overcoming Potential “Outside the Common Purpose” Argument
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Akane distinguished gender-based and sexual crimes — rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage — from the remainder of crimes committed as outside the “common purpose” of Ansar Dine/AQIM in occupying Timbuktu. The common purpose doctrine recognizes that individuals who engage in a joint criminal venture share responsibility for the crime, allowing courts to hold them accountable for acts committed by others as part of a common purpose. Judge Akane viewed these crimes as opportunistic, committed by actors who exploited women’s vulnerability in detention or in situations of forced marriage. Commentators on the Al Hassan decision have starkly disagreed with Judge Akane’s findings as relying too heavily on long-debunked ICC precedent that rape within a “coercive environment” does not necessarily bring rape into a group’s common purpose. This line of thinking suggests that “those who created the coercive environment appear to have done so with the explicit shared purpose of controlling sexual and other aspects of the lives of women and girls in Timbuktu,” according to law professors Rosemary Grey and Valerie Oosterveld.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have sought to control all aspects of the lives of women and girls. With such extensive control, it would be hard to argue that the Taliban does not aim to control women’s sexuality, as well as other aspects of their lives, arguably bringing sexual violence such as forced marriage and rape into their common purpose.
Conclusion
The striking similarities between the Al Hassan case and the Taliban’s policies underscore a critical need for ICC intervention. The Taliban’s systemic gender persecution mirrors the grave offenses identified in the Al Hassan case. They fall under the purview of the Rome Statute, which mandates accountability for such egregious acts. The international community must act decisively to prosecute those responsible for these crimes, ensuring that perpetrators of gender-based persecution face justice. This action is not only crucial for upholding the rule of law but also for affirming a global commitment to protecting human rights and dismantling impunity for gender-based violence.
Grace Luloff is a second-year master’s student at Georgetown University in the Conflict Resolution program. Her research focuses on atrocity prevention and transitional justice in Afghanistan and Central Africa.
What an ICC Case on Mali Means for Prosecuting Taliban Gender Crimes
The ban on girls’ secondary education, together with other policies by the Islamic Emirate, have severely affected the lives of female teachers across Afghanistan. This is seldom truer than it is in Shughnan, a mountainous district in Badakhshan province where men and women have long specialised in teaching, working in their own district and beyond. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini has sought to understand what’s happening in this fragment of Afghanistan, one of the lesser known of the country’s many faces.The bridge connecting Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Shughnan district, seen from the Afghan side. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
The number of female teachers in Afghanistan has plummeted since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). In 2018, women accounted for nearly 81,000 – 36 per cent – of the 226,000 teachers in the country’s state schools, according to a survey by Education International. By August 2022, one year after the IEA came to power, 11,500 women teachers had been pushed out of a job (see SIGAR here and this AAN backgrounder on the evolution of Taleban thinking on education). According to the 2023/2024 statistical yearbook, the women teachers employed are currently slightly over 71,000.[1] While the abrupt end to girls’ education beyond the sixth grade has been the most significant overall contributor to the decline in the number of female teachers (see this AAN report), over time, other IEA restrictions, such as preventing women teaching boys, have added to the decline (see this Human Rights Watch report). The IEA’s decisions regarding universities, such as the ban on women attendance (see BBC report) and the announcement of new rules that prevent women professors from teaching male students, caused a further loss of jobs for women educators.Although most of the teachers affected by the IEA decisions have not been fired and receive at least a part of their former salaries while sitting at home, the impact of the restrictions on their lives has been devastating. In some places, the policies have affected entire communities, leading to social and economic imbalances at the local level. One place where the restrictions have had an outsized impact is Shughnan district in Badakhshan province in the northeastern Amu River valley, bordering Tajikistan, where teachers account for a sizeable portion of the local workforce. In this district, the IEA’s policies are proving disastrous for the local population.
AAN has been listening to a number of female teachers from Shughnan and neighbouring districts, all increasingly depressed by the situation, concerned about losing their profession, the meaning attached to it and the status it affords them.[2] They are distressed by the deterioration of their household economies and their social standing as women in their communities.
Shughnan: a remote corner of Afghanistan
As a hadith of the Prophet goes, one should seek knowledge, even if it means going as far as China.[3] To find quite a deal of knowledge in Afghanistan, however, it suffices to stop shortly before the Chinese border. Travelling across Badakhshan province all the way up one of the branches of the ancient Silk Road, one reaches a remote mountain region, turned by modern boundaries into a cul-de-sac where only a few types of trade thrive, and those largely illegal ones. Shughnan is one of the so-called Pamir[4] districts – high-altitude areas in the northeastern-most corner of Afghanistan, largely inhabited by speakers of Eastern Iranian languages (the Pamiri languages, such as Shughni, Zibaki and Wakhi), who are followers of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam.[5] Subjected in past decades to isolation, and marginalisation from the centres of Afghan politics and economy, the inhabitants of these districts have occasionally experienced discrimination and exploitation at the hands of political and military actors – typically belonging to the Sunni majority of central Badakhshan – who more often than not have enjoyed hegemony and control over the Ismaili areas. The Ismaili inhabitants, given their condition of minority and vulnerability, have also proven to be a peaceful and law-abiding community, keen on cooperating and supporting a central government able to bring a degree of security and order. Moreover, despite their remote location and poverty, the residents of these districts have consistently displayed satisfactory social indicators, at least with respect to educational standards, particularly when it comes to gender equality in education.
View on Shughnan from the Afghan side of the Panj, with Tajikistan in the background. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
Shughnan district represents the foremost example of this, standing out among the other Pamir districts for its early and remarkable achievements in education. Shughnan shares a common history with neighbouring border districts such as Ishkashim and Wakhan: once ruled by an independent lineage of rulers who controlled the territory on both banks of the Panj river[6] these districts were integrated into Afghanistan only at the end of the 19th century during the reign of Amir Abdul Rahman Khan (r 1880-1901). Shortly afterwards, in 1895, a boundary commission set the river’s course as the border between Afghanistan and Russia (now Tajikistan). It was a most unsatisfactory choice, given that the riverbanks in this deep-cut and high-elevation valley represented the only suitable areas for human settlements; the new border split communities and separated many farmers from their fields. Shughnan, in particular, which until then had been the most prominent of the Ismaili principalities, lost much of its agricultural land, which was located on the right bank of the river. Bereft of agricultural resources other than its famed mulberry orchards, the population was unable to support itself. The area went through hard times, including an armed rebellion in 1925 against the oppressive rule and heavy taxation of government officials.
Living to teach and teaching to live
A turning point came only a couple of decades later, when, likely through the good offices of a Shughni (his name lost to time), who had been brought to Kabul in his youth as a ghulam bacha (a court page raised to serve the Afghan kingdom as a loyal official outside the system of tribal alliances) and who had not forgotten the plight of his home district, a high school was built in Shughnan. It was inaugurated in 1939-40. Lycee Rahmat was a unique institution in such a remote district at a time when high schools could only be found in provincial capitals or large cities. It created opportunities for locals to access higher education and pursue a career in teaching, as an alternative form of livelihood to the limited farming still possible. In the following decades, the Afghan educational system slowly expanded to rural areas throughout the country and the district of Shughnan became a rich source of teachers not only for Badakhshan but also for provinces further afield. As one of the teachers interviewed recalled, in the absence of other local commodities, education became an exportable resource for the people of Shughnan:
There’s very little agricultural land in Shughnan district, but the area is very populated. Local people have no other income. For this reason, if more than one person in a family is literate and educated, they will find a job outside the area, in Afghanistan’s other districts and cities. The ability to work anywhere means they can contribute to the family’s income.
This trend did not stop during the decades of war that hit the country, starting in 1978. Shughnan remained firmly under Kabul’s control almost until the collapse of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government in 1992. Its schools remained open even during the civil war that followed (1992-2001), between mujahedin factions and then between the Taleban and the government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. It was actually in the 1990s that, despite the dire lack of funding, the district saw the inauguration of a teacher training centre, the only one in the province outside Faizabad, officially sanctioning its role as a provider of teachers for the broader northeast of Afghanistan, which, back then, was under the control of Rabbani’s government (see AAN reporting here).
The establishment of the Agha Khan Development Network (AKDN) operations in Badakhshan in the late 1990s and the strengthening of the ties between the locals and international Ismaili communities and institutions, with their strong emphasis on the importance of learning, certainly favoured the continuation of what had already become a local tradition and export commodity for Shughnan. Despite the increase in the number of teacher training centres and prospective teachers across the province and the rest of Afghanistan in the years after 2001, Shughni teachers kept their primacy and benefited from some economic and social improvements in their positions thanks to the financial support offered by the international community. Indeed, many interviewees told AAN that if previously, most Shughni families already had a member working as a teacher under the Republic, the ratio increased, with some households counting as many as three or even five.
A former superintendent at the Directorate of Education in Shughnan district estimated the number of Shughnis employed as teachers at the fall of the Republic to have been around 2,500, of whom 1,800 were employed outside the district, while other interviewees claimed the number of teachers was actually higher. Whatever the true figure, it is impressive when you consider the district’s population stands just over 30,000. While many teachers are still working in districts across Badakhshan province, the former superintendent said that for decades, Shughni teachers have been sent to as many as 21 provinces. If their destinations have mostly been majority Dari-speaking provinces, such as relatively close-by Takhar and Kunduz, finding work could still lead them, in some cases, even to the opposite corner of the country. Soraya, one of the women teachers interviewed, confirmed that this is still very much the case today: “They [teachers from Shughnan] travel to all districts of Badakhshan and even to Herat and Farah provinces, which are far from Badakhshan.”
With the bad state of road infrastructure, compounded more often than not, for many decades, by security problems, travelling could take days, if not weeks. The roads have not improved much since the 1950s. Before the IEA’s new interest in improving connections to China through the Wakhan corridor (read Khaama Press here), hardly any road building had taken place in the Pamir region. Even now, although roads leading to Ishkashim and Wakhan have been improved, Shughnan remains one of the most inaccessible districts in Afghanistan, and during the long winter months, travel is only possible on foot or by horse.
Most teachers return to Shughnan at the end of every school term to spend the holidays with their families, although others, said Soraya, travel to their school at the start of the school year in the month of Hamal, which starts on 21 March, and return home in the month of Qaws, which starts on 21 November. “That means they come home [only] after nine months – although some take their families with them.” Indeed, some teachers have eventually settled in their places of work and bring their families along.
In 2009, a Shughni teacher employed in Faizabad told the author how he would live almost ten months a year in a rented room with other colleagues in the provincial capital and undertake adventurous travel, partly by car and partly on foot (one week each way) to return to Shughnan for the long winter break. Things were only slightly easier during the two-week summer break, when the seasonal opening of a high mountain pass over the Shiwa Plateau, reduced the trip to two days only.
A group of travelers en route from Shughnan to Ishkashim tries in vain to clear the way for a vehicle at the end of winter. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
This lifestyle is more typical for Shughni men. The mobility of Afghan women has always been hampered by higher hurdles. Even so, female teachers from this district have also travelled for work. Indeed, another teacher interviewed estimated that in recent times, the number of Shughni women teachers employed outside the district was nearly three times more than those teaching in the district itself. In other words, some 900 female Shughni teachers had been (or are currently) working away from home, especially in districts in Badakhshan, where Shughni women traditionally accounted for a large share of the female teachers in Faizabad, as well as elsewhere in the province (see AAN’s 2012 report on education in Badakhshan here).
The fact that many male teachers take up positions in faraway places has further enhanced the central economic and social role of women teachers in Shughnan, as they came to make up roughly half of the local teachers, and are often the main breadwinners in their families. Moreover, teaching is a profession that commands much respect in the area. Despite the insufficient salaries teachers have received for most of Afghanistan’s recent history (see AAN’s 2015 report detailing the problems in contract and salary conditions of teachers here), households in Shughnan that claim teachers among their members have generally fared better economically than those who are solely farmers. Over the decades, this, coupled with other cultural, religious and political traits of the local Ismaili population, gave many Shughni female teachers a prominent role in local society.
Multiplying the effects of education
“If you teach a man,” said one of the interviewees, “you teach one person, but if you teach a woman, you educate three people.” By quoting this local saying she went on to explain how an educated woman, necessarily, brings about a change inside her family, as the benefits of her education are amplified. The importance attached to education and the respect afforded to educators was quite apparent in the words of many of the teachers we interviewed. Stressing the suitability of women in taking up the role of educators both at school and at home, female Shughni teachers firmly believe in the power of education to change local society for the better. Female teachers, they believe, should be at the forefront of this reform, as one young teacher, Fawzia, explained:
Education is fundamental to all-round development everywhere, whether in cities or villages. Education in a remote society that does not have any kind of access to life’s conveniences is the best path to progress. For example, we can see the difference between a family whose members are all educated and a family that isn’t educated. We see the impact an educated family can have on themselves and their area. … [T]his itself causes the economy of a place to grow.
For Soraya, who lost her job as a teacher at a girls’ school in Shughnan after the IEA came to power, female teachers can play a transformative role in conservative rural societies:
Had there been no teachers, today’s world, with these levels of progress, would not exist. Therefore, whether in a rural community or a city, the role of the teacher is very important. But when it comes to how effective the role of female teachers can be, this is even more important in the villages and among the rural people because female teachers can help those people and their families understand the need to break some traditions. On top of teaching students in class, female teachers can put an end to some old customs. For example, in some areas, people believe women should not study and work. So, I can say that female teachers are extremely important because they can change people’s old beliefs and ways of thinking.
The head of a secondary school for girls, Sharifa, also currently at home, shared Soraya’s opinion:
Female teachers can be an example for other women [showing them] that they too could win their freedom and rights and defend those rights.In rural communities where more women are teachers, the other women of the village are more aware and have more independent personalities.
Another teacher, Narges, pointed to the dedication and hard work of female teachers compared to many male colleagues and their value as role models for their pupils and their families. Drawing on her experience outside the district, she said: “Families are encouraged to let their daughters go to school [when they see female teachers].” In Shughnan, she added: “it’s been a long time since anyone has kept their girls from going to school.”
Such views cannot be easily dismissed as over-optimistic, wishful thinking, as they might be, if coming from other rural districts of Afghanistan. The female teachers expressing these views draw on their firsthand experience of and participation in a social reform they have seen, against all odds, become a reality in Shughnan over the past 70 years – at least until the most recent and unexpected turn of events.
Part of a decades-long tradition
Most interviewees trace the presence of female teachers in their district back to an earlier era, one where the politicised struggle between so-called ‘western-influenced’ modern education and ‘fundamentalist’ religious schooling was not top of the agenda in Afghanistan, as Farida explained:
We’ve had female teachers in Shughnan for more than sixty years. My father, who is seventy-five years old, says he had a female teacher when he was a pupil at the Bashar primary school, the only school at that time in Shughnan. Her name was Sayed Begum, and she taught Dari.
Another teacher, Narges, also recalled her teacher.
We had female teachers who, twenty years ago, had been teaching for forty years. Then, they retired and some of them have now died. If we count it this way, seventy to eighty years ago, we had women teachers in Shughnan, teaching in schools that were called village schools.
Testimonies indicate that the early presence of female teachers in Shugnan was not due to the influence of the then (slowly) expanding model of modern education from the centre, which was epitomised by the establishment of four lycées, with foreign curricula and often foreign languages as their medium of education, in Kabul between the 1910s and 1920s. Rather, our interviewees suggest that in their district, it was locals who spurred the transformation that sprang from the modest local high school established in 1940. Also, however, self-taught women who overcame barriers and went on to teach in village schools were important, as Soraya recalls:
Shughnan has had female teachers in its schools for more than 60 years. But I should say that the women who were teachers many years ago didn’t have higher education. Some had mostly received their education at home, reading religious texts and poetry books like Hafez-e Shirazi. But in this way, they became literate and could read and write and were appointed as teachers in Shughnan schools due to necessity. Gradually, they gained experience, added to their knowledge, with a lot of effort, and then could keep teaching.
Shughni youth in a hamlet’s mehmankhana (guesthouse). All available surfaces have been used as blackboards for teaching. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
Shughnan after 2022: a functioning model of local economy and society endangered
Shughnan has been heavily affected by IEA policies on girls’ education. According to the former superintendent interviewed by AAN, more than half of the over 300 women who, until recently, worked as teachers, have lost their jobs. According to other interviewees, some female teachers have been let go because of cuts to teaching staff. Others, who have been forced out of the classroom by the IEA’s restrictions – they include those who had taught at girls’ high schools – still receive a salary, now reduced to 5,000 afghani (USD 70) a month, from the state. In the words of Sharifa:
Some teachers lost their jobs because the education department in Badakhshan downsized or reduced the tashkil after the Taleban came to power. They don’t get a salary. … [O]thers who still sign their attendance sheet receive a salary of 5,000 afghanis. They don’t receive it on time, only after five or six months. Also, the Taleban get 500 Afs of that as zakat and a teacher only receives 4,500. Their salaries have been reduced to half. In the past, they received 10,000 [USD 140] to 13,000 afghanis [USD 185].
Until recently, the teachers sitting at home received an average of 6,500 Afs (USD 92) , but the salaries of all female public sector employees who have been forced to stay home by the IEA has now been reduced to 5,000 Afs by order of the Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada (read AAN report on the pay cut and its consequences here).[7] All the teachers we spoke to knew about the pay cut, but at the time of the interview, they had not seen its application. At any rate, their monthly salaries, which were hardly sufficient to make a living, were never paid on time, they said, and were usually delayed by four to six months. “They pay our salaries,” said Narges, “with a delay of four months and with the money we finally get, we can hardly cover our expenses for two of the months we’ve waited.”
Interviewees also reported that many Shughni teachers employed outside the district, both those commuting periodically back home and others who had settled elsewhere, had now returned to Shughnan after losing their jobs. Most of them, especially women, who are barred from most other jobs, could not find other ways to earn a living. After spending some months searching for employment, they were in dire circumstances and many had decided to try and leave Afghanistan for good, as Sharifa said:
With the coming of the Taleban government, most of those who were working in the provinces became unemployed and returned to their homes. They either live in a desperate and inadequate situation or have gone to Pakistan or Iran.
Teachers employed in other provinces returning to their homes during the winter break, Roshan area of Shughnan district. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
This is not the first time Shughni teachers have faced hardship, privations and bans. After the arrival of the mujahedin in 1991-92, for example, the local situation became complicated. The local Ismailis were accused of having supported the PDPA and some, especially those who had worked for the Kabul government, such as teachers, risked harassment. Initially, restrictions were placed on female teachers, as Sharifa recalled:
When the mujahedin came and Burhanuddin Rabbani became the head of state in Afghanistan, he had a somewhat extreme behaviour. He didn’t let female teachers teach at boys’ schools. But after a while, this problem was solved and everything returned to its place. There was another problem, though. Rabbani and the mujahedin couldn’t govern and the salaries of teachers and employees were cut. Despite that, the teachers, without any salary or benefits, wouldn’t let the schools close. They kept going to school and teaching students.
The comparison ends there. Back then, Shughni teachers eventually saw their positive social role recognised, if not remunerated. The efforts by those teachers to keep education alive across northeastern Afghanistan during the difficult decade before 2001 – with no government support and only limited economic help from NGOs such as the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and AKDN – are still remembered in Shughnan. Several local teachers speaking to the author back in 2009 referred to this time as their ‘jihad’, comparing it to the service to the Afghan nation that mujahedin fighters boasted of. From the more recent interviews, it appears that keeping schools alive during that hard time still provides a source of pride for teachers who lived through it, including Sharifa:
Shughnan was the only district to have already had a teacher training college 35 years ago. Boys and girls studied there in the same class. Many boys’ schools had female teachers, which was rare in other parts of Afghanistan. … We had English language teachers who taught a course in Faizabad and hundreds of boys were studying on that language course whose teachers were Shughni women.
Pride gives way to despair
The pride in their perseverance in the face of difficulties has now given way to despair and a sense of futility. Many interviewees feared the government could progressively and quietly do away with their already heavily reduced salaries. They felt they could do nothing to prevent this, as under the IEA “teachers are not allowed to say anything” and “no one has the right to protest.”
The situation is, of course, especially bad for those women who are no longer allowed to work. Interviewees equated the plight of those who have been compelled to stay at home but still receive a heavily reduced salary to that of those who have completely lost their jobs. “In general,” said Farida, “those who taught the sixth grade and above are at home, which means losing our jobs because we don’t work only for a salary. We enjoyed working and serving the children.
These feelings relate to the loss of purpose and role in life, the fear of even their meagre salaries disappearing and hopelessness about their ability to mobilise to defend their rights. These are largely coincident with those expressed by other female public workers countrywide, as detailed in this recent AAN report. Our interviewees also made clear that the economic and psychological impact of IEA policies were exacting a heavy toll not only on the women but also on their families. One of the teachers, Farida, explained:
It’s a very bad and painful situation for women because we’re not allowed to leave the house and our economy and expenses are now completely dependent on other family members. … Apart from the fact that the behaviour of the families has changed, the women themselves are suffering from mental problems. This situation has affected many women and girls with mental problems. The women are nervous and sometimes fight with other members of the family because they’re mentally unstable.
Her feelings were echoed by Sharifa:
Every family has a different way of life and perspective. However, in general, I can say that when the family’s economy weakens, without doubt, a person’s mental status or psyche is damaged as well. This problem causes one to be in a bad temper and there’ll be conflict at home with one person blaming another.
Another problem is that female teachers and women in general who used to work and were not dependent on their family members, that is, their husbands or fathers or brothers, had their own funds. But now their husbands or brothers have to pay for them, and that’s another, separate issue. In itself, it’s a problem for women, how much money they get from their fathers or brothers or husbands. This is really hard and painful for them.
The possibility that such dramatic changes in the economic situation of women could lead to a loss of social status is real, even in liberal and progressive communities like those of Shughnan. Conflicts and subjugation inside families are likely to increase, especially in poor and resourceless regions like this one. Over the past decades, as the author found on a research trip in 2009, the area has been hit particularly hard by opiate addiction, exacerbated by its position on a trafficked border. Additionally, local women are not accustomed to being dependent on men and are unlikely to easily abide by their new circumstances of seclusion and subjugation. Soraya has seen evidence of this already:
Unfortunately, some female teachers complain about bad behaviour inside the family, especially women whose husbands are drug addicts. Sometimes, their husbands even beat them because they used to give them some money to buy opium, heroin, or whatever they were using. But now, these men can’t work and neither can their wives, so in some families, women are suffering violence.
Interviewees like Narges also mentioned an increase in forced marriages, prompted by the economic woes faced by families: “Some families behave badly. Some have forced girls who were teachers to get married. This will eventually drive the girls crazy.”
Over the past spring, an independent monitoring NGO reported several instances of honour killings or suicide among girls as a result of being pressured by their family to marry in other Pamir districts such as Ishkashim and Wakhan (see also this report by Afghan Witness on the issue). An interviewee, a student of midwifery from Ishkashim, confirmed the link between those deaths and the lack of access to education and prospects:
Today, teachers who’ve studied and gained bachelor’s and master’s degrees have turned to handicraft skills to meet the economic needs of their families. … The situation of women who’ve stopped working and are not active is not so good. It is because, in the past, they used to be self-sufficient and could at least provide for the necessities. Along with men, women were also supporters of their families, financially. Now, the behaviour of some men towards women might have changed because women who used to work outside are now at home. It’s a major challenge for men and women in our society.
She also spoke about the impact on those who should still have been at school:
Nowadays, the closure of schools is a big challenge for girls. They’ve lost their goals and dreams during the three years of school closure. Almost all girls are forced to get married, and where I live, every day, I see an educated girl who’s deprived of schooling being married off. They’re disappointed and worried because it’s the girls who educate a generation, but now they’re deprived of an education. Just where I live, I’ve seen several cases of girls taking their own lives. This is all down to unemployment and the lack of education.
AAN tried to find out about the occurrence of such incidents in Shughnan. Some of the teachers interviewed, such as Sharifa, confirmed that they have also happened there:
The fact that a girl isn’t allowed to study and achieve her ambition is the biggest problem in her life. And when a woman isn’t allowed to work outside the home, all her freedom and rights are taken away from her and she’s imprisoned at home. Then, what is left for her? Right now, I can say that women and girls are literally imprisoned in their homes, where all their rights have been taken away. Some families force their daughters to get married. Unfortunately, we have seen the suicide of several girls who were educated. After the universities were closed, their fathers forced them to marry, but these girls preferred to die.
That it was often highly educated girls who, in the face of their families’ decision to get them married, preferred to take their own lives was also mentioned by Mahram, a resident of Bashar village in Shughnan who said he knew some such cases. He cautioned, though, that it would be difficult to gather information about them, adding that he had heard from a teacher from Roshan (the northern part of Shughnan district) that the local Taleban authorities had held a meeting with the village heads in that area, stressing that such incidents should not be discussed publicly or with the media.
Shughnan district will not lose overnight the cultural and social achievements made over several decades by its own people that have become part of its identity. Nevertheless, the district is undoubtedly facing one of its darkest times, Fawzia said:
Sometimes, because life and economic problems increase, people’s tolerance becomes low and this causes them to behave inappropriately. … [T]he treatment of women in Shughnan district is generally very good, whether they’re responsible for their families or unemployed, as is the case now. Only some narrow-mindedpeople or [those] who aren’t educated have changed their behaviour.The main challenge in our region with school closures is that some girls are forced to get married. That is not because of family pressure, but because of unemployment, economic problems and despair. … [T]here are some people who endure problems and are patient. From my personal point of view, I have a feeling of darkness, that there is no light to see ahead. We don’t feel we see the daylight. We feel it is always night, darkness and nightmares. We feel good dreams never come true.
The unique position of Shughnis, especially its women, as the country’s educators is at risk of vanishing as though it were only a dream. The people of this district, who lost half their land when it became part of Afghanistan and painstakingly worked out a solution to overcome their resulting lack of resources and managed to become part of and contribute to the country’s life in such a vital sector as education, now stand to be left without viable options.
Shughnan had already been put to the test during the civil war of the 1990s, but this is the first time that its hard-gained, fragile economy – one based on learning and teaching – is facing outright obliteration. Such a scenario would not only see the deterioration of the district’s hard-won social development but also lead to significant economic decline. Furthermore, if more Shughni teachers, men and women alike, lose their jobs, livelihoods and social standing, and are forced to migrate in search of a livelihood and a better life, the dramatic loss of human capital and expertise for Afghanistan would be incalculable.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
In its July 2023 accountability session, the IEA mentioned that 92,000 women were working in the public education sector, although not all were employed as teachers (see this AAN report).
↑2
The names of all interviewees have been changed in order to protect their privacy.
↑3
A famous hadith, though most Islamic scholars consider its chain of transmission to be daʿīf (weak) and thus likely spurious, it has sometimes been considered hasan (fair) on account of its wide circulation. It appears as hadith number 28,697 in Kanz al-Ummal fi Sunan al-Aqwal wa al-Af’al (Treasures of the Doers of Good Deeds) by Ali ibn Abd-al-Malik al-Hindi, 1472 CE – 1567 CE.
↑4
Geographically, the Pamir Mountains are located mostly in Tajikistan on the right side of the Amu River and its headstream the Panj, with the exception of Wakhan district in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province. However, in Afghanistan, Shughnis, Zibakis, Wakhis and other communities in the area are often referred to as Pamiris.
↑5
Ismailis separated from other Shia Muslims as they recognised a different line of imams from among the descendants of caliph Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as the rightful heirs to religious and political leadership. They live nowadays in many countries across the world; in Afghanistan they inhabit mostly Badakhshan and Baghlan provinces.
↑6
The Panj is the headstream of the Amu Darya which forms Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and partially with Turkmenistan.
↑7
On 2 June 2024, the de facto Directorate General of Administrative Affairs issued a letter purporting to “standardise” the salaries of women civil servants hired by the former administration to 5,000 Afghanis per month, regardless of grade, pegging women’s salaries to the lowest possible level. However, on 7 July 2024, the de facto Ministry of Finance issued a letter clarifying that the order would be applied to women civil servants who did not attend work daily or did not perform their duties according to their job description, and that it did not apply to women who were reporting to work and performing their duties (read this UN report).
Education in Hibernation: The end of a virtuous cycle of literacy and empowerment for women in Shughnan?
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
The bridge connecting Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Shughnan district, seen from the Afghan side. Photo by Fabrizio Foschini, 2009
