Afghan girls concern return to ”darkish days” amid Taliban sweep

It was early night and Zahra, her mom and three sisters have been on their method to dinner at one other sister’s house after they noticed individuals operating and heard gunshots on the road.
“The Taliban are here!” individuals screamed.
In just some minutes, every thing modified for the 26-year-old resident of Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest metropolis.

Zahra grew up in a largely Taliban-free Afghanistan, the place girls dared to dream of careers and women obtained an schooling. For the previous 5 years, she has been working with native nonprofit organisations to boost consciousness for girls and press for gender equality.
Her goals and ambitions got here crashing down Thursday night because the Taliban swept into the town, planting their white flags emblazoned with an Islamic proclamation of religion in a central sq. as individuals on bikes and in vehicles rushed to their properties.
Like most different residents, Zahra, her dad and mom and 5 siblings are actually hunkering indoors, too scared to exit and apprehensive in regards to the future. The Associated Press selected to not establish her by her full identify to keep away from making her a goal.
Stranded individuals crossing the border between Pakistan Afghanistan, in Chaman, Pakistan, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021. (AP)
“I am in big shock,” stated Zahra, a round-faced, soft-spoken younger girl. “How can it be possible for me as a woman who has worked so hard and tried to learn and advance, to now have to hide myself and stay at home?” Amid a lightning offensive over the previous a number of days, the Taliban now management greater than two-thirds of the nation, simply two weeks earlier than the U.S. plans to withdraw its final troops. And they’re slowly closing in on the capital, Kabul.
The U.N. refugee company says almost 250,000 Afghans have fled their properties for the reason that finish of May amid fears the Taliban would reimpose their strict and ruthless interpretation of Islam, all however eliminating girls’s rights. Eighty % of these displaced are girls and youngsters.
The fundamentalist group dominated the nation for 5 years till the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. During that point, it forbade women an schooling and ladies the appropriate to work, and refused even to allow them to journey exterior their properties with out a male family member to accompany them. The Taliban additionally carried out public executions, chopped off the palms of thieves and stoned girls accused of adultery.
There have been no confirmed reviews of such excessive measures in areas the Taliban fighters just lately seized. But militants have been reported to have taken over some homes and set fireplace to not less than one faculty.
At a park in Kabul, reworked since final week right into a shelter for the displaced, households advised the AP on Friday that women driving house in a motorized rickshaw within the northern Takhar province have been stopped and lashed for sporting “revealing sandals.” A schoolteacher from the province stated nobody was allowed to exit to the market with out a male escort. Some 3,000 households primarily from northern provinces just lately taken over by the Taliban now stay in tents contained in the park, some on the sidewalks.

Zahra stopped going to the workplace a few month in the past because the militants approached Herat, and he or she labored remotely from house. But on Thursday, Taliban fighters broke via the town’s defensive traces, and he or she has been unable to work since.
Her eyes welled up with tears as she thought-about the chance that she will be unable to return to work; that her 12-year-old sister shall be unable to proceed going to high school (She loves studying”); that her older brother will be unable play soccer; or that she received’t be capable of freely play the guitar once more. The instrument held on a wall behind her as she spoke.
She listed a number of the achievements made by girls previously 20 years for the reason that Taliban’s ouster  incremental however significant positive factors in what remains to be a deeply conservative, male-dominated society: Girls are actually at school, and ladies are in Parliament, authorities and enterprise.
Marianne O’Grady, Kabul-based deputy nation director for Care International, stated the strides made by girls over the previous twenty years have been dramatic, significantly in city areas, including she can’t see issues going again to the best way they have been, even with a Taliban takeover.
“You can’t uneducate millions of people,” she stated. If girls “are back behind walls and not able to go out as much, at least they can now educate their cousins and their neighbours and their own children in ways that couldn’t happen 25 years ago.” Still, a way of dread seems to be omnipresent, significantly amongst girls, as Taliban forces take extra territory every day.
Taliban fighters stand guard at a checkpoint inside the town of Farah, capital of Farah province southwest of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Mohammad Asif Khan)
“I feel we are like a bird who makes a nest for a living and spends all the time building it, but then suddenly and helplessly watches others destroy it,” stated Zarmina Kakar, a 26-year-old girls’s rights activist in Kabul.
Kakar was a 12 months outdated when the Taliban entered Kabul the primary time in 1996, and he or she recalled a time when her mom took her out to purchase her ice cream, again when the Taliban dominated. Her mom was whipped by a Taliban fighter for revealing her face for a few minutes.
“Today again, I feel that if Taliban come to power, we will return back to the same dark days,” she stated.