As Taliban advance on Kabul, concerns mount for Afghanistan’s women and girls – National | Globalnews.ca

A high school for girls is burned down in Faryab. Bank employees in Kandahar are sent home, because they are women. A female journalist is on the run, fearing she will be targeted.

The rapid advance of the Taliban across Afghanistan has raised concerns for the country’s women and girls.

“The Taliban’s oppression of women is not marginal to their ideology. It is its very basis,” Sarah Keeler of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan said Friday.

“We are outraged by the muted response of the international community.”

Amid a U.S. military withdrawal, Taliban militants seized three more cities on Friday, including Kandahar and Herat. Afghan government forces appeared on the verge of collapse.

Photos posted on Taliban social media sites showed captured caches of weapons, trucks and even a helicopter in the hands of the armed fundamentalist group.

The U.S. and Britain have sent troops to Kabul to evacuate embassy staff, and an intelligence official warned the capital could fall within 90 days.

The prospect of a return to Taliban rule has fueled widespread fear of a return to the mistreatment of women that characterized the militant group’s previous reign.

Between 1996 and 2001, women and girls were banned from schools, ordered not to work outside the home, and forced to stay indoors, except when escorted by a male relative.

Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi said this week that, in areas that had fallen to the Taliban during its current offensive, women were once again being confined to their homes.

“Women in many places have been told not to leave their houses without having a male member with them,” she was reported to have said by Kabul Now.

She called for women’s rights to be respected.

But the Taliban, which on Friday called its military gains a “victory of God,” has avoided spelling out its plans for women, and its actions have not been reassuring.

0:45
Canada opposed to a government installed by force in Afghanistan: Freeland

Eighty-percent of the 250,000 Afghans who have fled their homes since the end of May are women and children, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said Friday.

“In areas now controlled by Taliban forces, there are reports of rapes of girls, and edicts were issued demanding that families hand over girls aged 15 and over, and widows up to the age of 45, for forced marriages to Taliban soldiers,” Keeler said in a statement to Global News.

“Just as they were under Taliban rule, women are reportedly being forbidden from leaving home unaccompanied, forbidden from working, live under enforced dress codes, and have been violently beaten or flogged by members of the Taliban.”

Writing on the website Medium, Murwarid Ziayee, senior director of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, wrote that a colleague had been “forbidden from going to the pharmacy to buy medicine for her ill mother in a district controlled by the Taliban in Takhar province.”

“There, each family — many of whom are poverty-stricken, struggling to feed themselves — has been asked to rotate buying and cooking food for large groups of Taliban. If they disobey, they are brutally punished.”

“The Taliban haven’t changed and they will never change.”

The Calgary-based group is planning protests in Ottawa and Vancouver on Saturday, and is calling for a “robust international security response” to halt the Taliban.

In the years since the Taliban was ousted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, women and girls have made strides, returning to schools, jobs and politics.

Canada’s “Women and Girls’ Rights First” policy directed millions to Afghan women’s groups, with the aim of advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality.

“There are now 3.3 million girls in education, and women more actively participate in the political, economic and social life of the country,” Amnesty International wrote in a report in May.

“Despite ongoing conflict, Afghan women have become lawyers, doctors, judges, teachers, engineers, athletes, activists, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, business owners, police officers, and members of the military.”

The Taliban are now intent on retaking the capital, risking a reversal of the advances made by women and girls.

In a statement Friday, the Taliban claimed it was the victim of “baseless and sinister propaganda,” and said it would protect Afghans. “No one should worry about this.”

But many are worried.

“I’m not safe because I’m a 22-year-old woman and I know that the Taliban are forcing families to give their daughters as wives for their fighters,” a journalist in hiding wrote anonymously in the Guardian.

“I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all of my colleagues.”

“All my female colleagues in the media are terrified. Most have managed to flee the city and are trying to find a way out of the province, but we are completely surrounded. All of us have spoken out against the Taliban and angered them through our journalism.”

[email protected]