“With every city collapsing, human bodies collapse, dreams collapse, history and future collapse, art and culture collapse, life and beauty collapse, our world collapse,”
-Rada Akbar (afghan photographer), 12th August 2021
Kabul has fallen; and 20 years of struggle, effort, and revolution that went into establishing democracy in Afghanistan have fallen with it.
Airports are under attack by the Taliban to flush out all those who resorted to the airports in an attempt to flee the country before hell lashes out in their cities as well.
Millions have had to flee their homes to other countries and 80 % of them were estranged women and children.
After decades of endeavor for gaining their fundamental rights, and being viewed as humans instead of objects for men, women of Afghanistan feel more defeated than anyone else in the country.
Reports claim that the Taliban militants collecting data about girls from the age 6 to age 45 so that they can arrange coercive marriages of these women with Islamist leaders, cases of revenge rape and abduction have been flooding the country, and minorities live in fear of being killed or converted to Sunni Islam forcefully. Alas, this is just the beginning.
To understand how things are going to deteriorate for women in the future, we will have to revisit the past- to a time period of 5 years when it all began.
Beginning from 1996 to 2001 the Taliban had ruled Afghanistan and imposed the Islamic law of ‘Sharia’ as the official law for the state, wherein women were reduced to mere vessels for bearing children and toys that men could puppet around.
Women were stripped off of all their basic rights; they could not work, education was forbidden fruit for them, they could not leave the house without donning a traditional attire for Muslim women called the Burqa, and every time they left the house they had to be accompanied by at least one male member of their families; and these are just a few of the regressive provisions that the doctrine has; women who had started to work for their own ambitions and sometimes to support their families will have to abandon their livelihoods and dreams, female students will be banned from going to their schools and completing their education, the concept of choice will be exterminated and women will rarely feel the daylight on their skins, let alone be able to leave their rooms at night.
Taliban’s false promises that women will be “allowed” in educational institutions are not fooling anyone, just 2 days ago when the Herat province was captured, all the female students and professors of Herat University were barred from entering and only the male faculty was allowed, all women employees of corporate firms are being fired and driven out and small businesses run by women are being closed down.
If this is the atrocious condition of the majority Muslim population then the tribulations entailing the minority population and especially women, are unfathomable; That is to say, if any minorities live through the ravages of a very possible ethnic cleansing in the first place.
Starting from 2009, ever since the records were kept for deaths and births in Afghanistan, the UN reports suggest that civilian deaths had increased by 50% in Afghanistan in June 2021 with more and more women and children being killed by Taliban insurgents.
Amid all the chaos, America continues to let Afghanis bear the brunt of its own blunders, with no signs of resilience whatsoever.
It seems like everyone has turned their backs on the woes of Afghanistan and muffed their ears to its screams for help; humanity is yet again in an ominous need to be rescued and with no aid in sight, the world’s morality has regressed along with Afghanistan’s social and political climate.
