Afghan girls on return of Taliban: ‘Feels like fowl who makes nest, then helplessly watches others destroy it’

It was early night and Zahra, her mom and three sisters have been on their strategy to dinner at one other sister’s house once they noticed individuals operating and heard gunshots on the road.

“The Taliban are here!” individuals screamed.In just some minutes, every little thing modified for the 26-year-old resident of Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest metropolis.LONG READ | Who are the Taliban? Zahra grew up in a principally Taliban-free Afghanistan, the place girls dared to dream of careers and ladies received an training. For the previous 5 years, she has been working with native nonprofit organizations to boost consciousness for girls and press for gender equality. Zarmina Kakar a girls’s rights activist cry throughout an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan. Kakar was a 12 months previous when the Taliban entered Kabul the primary time in 1996. (AP Photo)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 automobiles rushed to their properties.Also See: How wealthy is the Taliban? And the place does their cash come from?Like most different residents, Zahra, her dad and mom and 5 siblings at the moment are hunkering indoors, too scared to exit and anxious in regards to the future. The Associated Press selected to not determine her by her full identify to keep away from making her a goal.“I am in big shock,” mentioned 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 practically 2,50,000 Afghans have fled their properties for the reason that finish of May amid fears the Taliban would re-impose their strict and ruthless interpretation of Islam, all however eliminating girls’s rights. Eighty % of these displaced are girls and youngsters.Also See: Taliban tighten grip on Afghanistan as all eyes flip to capital Kabul, govt says it ‘stands agency’The fundamentalist group dominated the nation for 5 years till the 2001 US-led invasion. During that point, it forbade ladies an training and girls the precise to work, and refused even to allow them to journey exterior their properties with no male family member to accompany them. The Taliban additionally carried out public executions, chopped off the arms of thieves and stoned girls accused of adultery.There have been no confirmed experiences of such excessive measures in areas the Taliban fighters lately seized. But militants have been reported to have taken over some homes and set fireplace to at the very least one college.At a park in Kabul, remodeled since final week right into a shelter for the displaced, households instructed the AP on Friday that ladies 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 mentioned nobody was allowed to exit to the market with no male escort. Some 3,000 households primarily from northern provinces lately taken over by the Taliban now dwell 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 she or he labored remotely from house. But on Thursday, Taliban fighters broke via the town’s defensive traces, and she or he has been unable to work since.Her eyes welled up with tears as she thought of the chance that she will be unable to return to work; that her 12-year-old sister will likely be unable to proceed going to high school (“She loves learning”); that her older brother will be unable play soccer; or that she gained’t be capable of freely play the guitar once more. The instrument held on a wall behind her as she spoke.She listed among the achievements made by girls up to now 20 years for the reason that Taliban’s ouster — incremental however significant beneficial properties in what remains to be a deeply conservative, male-dominated society: Girls at the moment are at school, and girls are in Parliament, authorities and enterprise.Marianne O’Grady, Kabul-based deputy nation director for CARE International, mentioned the strides made by girls over the previous 20 years have been dramatic, notably in city areas, including she can not see issues going again to the best way they have been, even with a Taliban takeover.“You can’t uneducate millions of people,” she mentioned. If girls “are back behind walls and not able to go out as much, at least they can now educate their cousins and their neighbors and their own children in ways that couldn’t happen 25 years ago.”Still, a way of dread seems to be omnipresent, notably amongst girls, as Taliban forces take extra territory every day.“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,” mentioned Zarmina Kakar, a 26-year-old girls’s rights activist in Kabul.Kakar was a 12 months previous when the Taliban entered Kabul the primary time in 1996, and she or he 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 mentioned.Also Read | UN chief urges Taliban to halt offensive, start negotiationsAlso Read |The case for sanctioning Pakistan over Taliban advances in Afghanistan | OPINION