By Shafiqa Rehayee | Staff Writer
Afghanistan: The Taliban Wage War on Women
It has been over a year since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. This change in power dynamics has fundamentally undermined Afghan women’s rights.
Since seizing power on August 15, 2021, the Taliban has imposed countless policies that create huge barriers to women’s education and access to basic human rights. The irony is that the Taliban initially promised Afghan women that they would be able to return to school, but only after they took the necessary Sharia-based measures to reopen high schools and universities. The promise gave the international community a false good impression of the Taliban. On March 23, 2021, the Taliban announced that the girls would be able to continue school in the spring semester. Many young girls returned to school with unspeakable excitement to have a taste of the educational rights that they had enjoyed over the past 20 years under the previous government, the Afghan Republic. However, the following day, the Taliban shut the schools down.
The Taliban spokesman claims the barriers to education access are due to a lack of religious uniforms and female instructors for girls. These claims clearly reflect the waging of a war on women under the guise of aligning with Sharia values. Considering women’s pursuit of knowledge being abused by the regime, the Taliban seems to have a strong tendency to bring back the regime of the 1990s, when they not only strictly imposed social restrictions on women such as the obligatory all-covering burqa, but, more deleteriously, denied their access to health care services, education, and employment.
Afghan women are also rapidly disappearing from social and political spheres. There are no cabinet positions for women in the Taliban’s authoritarian government, which removed the Ministry of Women Affairs, forcing women to fade away from civil and political spheres. Under the new de facto government, there is no chance for women to exercise their social and cultural rights. The new regime banned Afghan women from government jobs and traveling more than 45 miles without a male guardian. Evidently, women are being exposed to human rights violations and getting stripped of their basic rights like the right to receive an education.
In the past few months, there were minor protests with women on the front line in response to marginalization by the Taliban asking for their basic rights, however, the Taliban broke up the protests by threatening and beating women. On 15 August 2022, the women protesters chanted asking for “bread, work, and freedom”, holding a banner reading “August 15 is a black day”, a reference to the day the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021, but the Taliban ended the protest by firing into the air and even threatening women and journalists with guns.
The Taliban rulers’ imposition of yet more restrictions on women from entering gyms, parks, and having funfairs in November 2022 ensures the reversal of progress made in women’s participation in public life over the last two decades. In the past 15 months, the regime tried to restrict women from entering parks and gyms by assigning separate days of the week for men and women, but now, women are being totally held back from engaging in public life. The Taliban justified the restrictions by claiming that women disregarded gender segregation and Islamic dress codes.
Women’s rights being annihilated in the blink of an eye by the infamous oppressive Islamic Taliban demonstrates that they have not changed their ruling over women, imitating the actions done in the 1990s. The marginalization, segregation, and institutionalized discrimination against women guarantees the international community that the Taliban is unable to either achieve the international legal status of a state or have the legal capacity to speak and act on behalf of one.
Sources
Afghanistan: Women Protesters Detail Taliban Abuse. (20 October 2022). Human Rights Watch.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/20/afghanistan-women-protesters-detail-taliban-abuse
Muslim Scholars, Activists: Taliban Ban on Girls’ Education Not Justified. (12 April 202). VOA News. https://www.voanews.com/a/muslim-scholars-activists-taliban-ban-on-girls-education-not-justified-/6526830.html
Taliban’s backtracking on girls’ education, ‘deeply damaging’. (23 March 2022). UN News, Global perspective Human stories https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1114482
Cover Photo: Illustration by Ema Anis for Amnesty International 2021
https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ASA1149682021ENGLISH.pdf