On International Women’s Day, Afghan ladies blast the Taliban and say the world has “neglected us completely”
Islamabad — As the world marks International Women’s Day on Wednesday, the ladies of Afghanistan have little to rejoice. The Taliban regime has methodically stripped them of their primary rights since reclaiming energy over the nation in the summertime of 2021. Forced from most workplaces and better schooling, many ladies with the means to take action have left their nation, and 1000’s now reside as refugees in neighboring Pakistan.
Journalist and tv presenter Nafeesa Malali is amongst them. She now lives in a small condominium in a distant nook of Pakistan’s sprawling capital, Islamabad. As she spoke to CBS News, the bottle of anti-depressants she’s been prescribed sat subsequent to her.
Courtesy of Nafeesa Malali
Malali mentioned she appears like she’s trapped in a cage. The pleasure of earlier ladies’s days of their native nation, through the US-led battle that pressured the Taliban from energy for 20 years, are a distant reminiscence.
“Prior to the Taliban regaining power, I would attend two to three functions organized on Women’s Day to celebrate the progress,” she mentioned.
Afghan ladies weren’t essentially handled as equals to males within the conservative nation through the battle, however they did achieve the rights to check, work and journey.
“Today, all of the past 20 years of progress have been erased, and the Taliban have excluded Afghan women from all parts of society,” she lamented.
Many Afghan ladies really feel the worldwide neighborhood has uncared for them because the Taliban got here again to energy. They see Western nations watching and condemning the Islamic hardliners, however doing little to assist.
Humaira, who used to work as a make-up artist for an Afghan nationwide tv community, has additionally turn into a refugee in Islamabad’s slums.
“It’s depressing to realize the international community has neglected us completely,” she informed CBS News. “I can’t afford to send my son and daughter to school. It costs around $30 a month. My life is miserable here and I can’t see a good future ahead.”
Humaira reserves her anger, and the entire blame for her present circumstances, solely for the Taliban, however she’s adamant that the US and different Western powers ought to have taken a harder stand because the hardline regime took concrete steps to deprive ladies of their rights.
She pointed particularly to the edict from the group’s supreme chief in December that noticed ladies indefinitely barred from the nation’s universities.
“Had the world taken a stronger stand against the Taliban, they wouldn’t have dared to exclude women from public life,” she mentioned.
In an announcement launched Wednesday, the United Nations’ mission to Afghanistan known as the nation essentially the most repressive on the earth on ladies’s rights, blasting the Taliban regime’s “singular focus on imposing rules that leave most women and girls effectively trapped in their homes.”
“It has been distressing to witness their methodical, deliberate, and systematic efforts to push Afghan women and girls out of the public sphere,” Roza Otunbayeva, particular consultant of the UN secretary-general and head of the UN mission to Afghanistan, mentioned within the assertion.
Sami Yousafzai/CBS News
Around 140 Afghan ladies held an International Women’s Day rally Wednesday in entrance of the press membership in Islamabad, chanting slogans in opposition to the Taliban, but in addition calling for motion from the remainder of the world.
Women’s rights activist Minisa Mubariz, 37, informed CBS News that she and the opposite ladies on the protest have been “extremely concerned about the international community’s silence on the situation for women in Afghanistan.”
“Afghanistan has become a prison for women. 20 million women are in this great Taliban prison, and the world is just watching and keeping silent,” she mentioned, including that it isn’t solely a figurative jail: She accused the Taliban’s intelligence companies of holding about 800 Afghan ladies in precise prisons, “brutally, against every right that should be given.”
“The tyranny of the Taliban is increasing day by day against Afghan women,” mentioned Mubariz (seen within the picture above within the yellow jacket and purple scarf).
Muzdalifa Kakar labored as a journalist and presenter for the TV community of the previous Afghan authorities’s parliament. She informed CBS News she was pressured to depart her nation about 4 months in the past.
“I am tired of the ineffective slogans of the international community,” she mentioned, calling on the world to “act responsibly” and cease “neglecting its duty” to Afghan ladies.
