“I have a message to the young Afghan generation, especially women living inside or outside Afghanistan. Please be diligent and make efforts for your country! Please do not limit yourselves! Believe in yourselves! Do not accept oppression and do not let anybody oppress you and the people around you! I request you all to expose any kind of oppression and restrictions you encounter! As a woman who is wanted by the Taliban Regime for opposing oppression, I want my message to be heard by all women: please do not be hopeless! Be confident and leave all fears behind! We were born free and we should live in freedom. How would it be different from death if we do not live freely? Stay brave and raise your voice together with your Afghan sisters! These voices will finally change history! I would also like to ask the United Nations, European Union, and all other human rights organizations to support us and not to recognize the Taliban Regime as an official government.” – Hammasa Farhood.
These are the words of Hamaasa Farhood, one of the organizers of women’s protests against the Taliban Regime, a civil rights activist, and a former employee of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. She was three and a half months pregnant when she participated in the protests against the oppressions of the Taliban Regime on September 4 and lost her baby after being hit by electric gear and poisoned by tear gas during one of the protests. When I asked her why she participated considering the risks, she said: “I do not want the girls of my country to move back to 22 years ago. Love for the children of my homeland made me participate in these protests. At that moment, I was only thinking about the freedom of my country and the women of my homeland. I was not even sure whether I would come out of there alive or not.”
After the siege of her house by the Taliban members, she managed to escape with the help of her neighbors and has not been able to return home yet. Wandering from one city to another, from one village to another, she has not been able to meet her husband and two children for five months. All these pressures have put her in a very poor mental state. However, Hamaasa wants to keep fighting for her and other women’s freedom. She is constantly striving to enlarge the community of women who do not accept the Taliban’s oppression. “Our plan is not to stay silent. They terrorized, captured, and threatened a number of us and are still searching for us. But this is not the end. We will not let them limit the women. We will not let our children, Afghan girls, be disappointed. We will stay with them to the last moments of life. Whatever they do to oppress and stop us, we will not keep silent.”, she stated.
After the takeover of the country in August 2021, gradually going back to 1996, women have been facing huge restrictions on their fundamental rights. International and national organizations stopped their women’s rights and capacity-building projects. Thousands of women became unemployed due to the male-female segregation policies of the Taliban. Although they promised to provide women with their work and education rights, their first move was to delete the Ministry of Women’s Affairs from the structure of the cabinet. In addition, they only permitted the schools to open for girls under 6th grade. Despite their promise to open the schools for girls over 6th grade at the beginning of the academic year, girls were sent back to their homes a few hours after waiting behind the doors of their schools. Furthermore, women were banned from traveling without a male partner (Mahram) inside and outside the country. Continuing the restrictions, on May 2 the Ministry of Vice and Virtue of the Taliban announced a decree for all women to cover their bodies from head to toe and acknowledged the burqa as the best and most desirable form of covering. The most heart-wrenching part of the following decree is that the ones who are going to be punished for disobeying the rule are the male guardians of the women, but not the women themselves, which spreads the responsibility of oppression to the family level and increases the power gap between men and women extensively. Unfortunately, this was not the end. In the latest move, on December 19, 2022, the Ministry of Higher Education of the Taliban Regime announced the prohibition of girls’ education in all public and private universities of the country. This decree puts an end to the dreams and ambitions of thousands of Afghan women residing in Afghanistan. Hence, the 20 years of national and international efforts for gender equality and the promotion of women are at great risk.
Women in Afghanistan are deeply concerned about losing the basic rights they fought for. Hamaasa is only one of the many examples of women who are in search of finding different ways to resist oppression and inequality. Although there is a lot of hope behind her words, unfortunately, there is almost no international support for these struggles. These are the women that the US and its allies claimed to be fighting for providing them freedom when they started the war with the Taliban in 2001. “Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment,” said Laura Bush on Nov 7, 2001. But today, these heroine women are abandoned by the international community, leaving them no choice but to either fight with Taliban’s brutality alone or obey the extreme lifestyle ordered by them. These women are living under extremely poor safety conditions. They are dealing with the fear of being killed every moment, leaving their homes and families to keep them safe, and covering their faces and identities not to be recognized. Despite witnessing all they are going through, the international community should not merely take the role of the observer. They should consider the urgent need to support these Afghan women’s physical and mental health, providing safe environments for them and their families. The world should not forget these women and leave them unarmed in an unequal war for freedom.