Promises vs Reality: Taliban Wants Us to Believe They've Changed. But Have They? Women Tell

As the Taliban takes control of the country, experts and activists suggest Afghanistan has again become an extremely dangerous place to be a woman.

In the past few weeks alone, there have been many reports of casualties and violence. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. The United Nations Refugee Agency says about 80 per cent of those who have fled since the end of May are women and children.

Here’s what women had to day on the return of the Taliban:

One anonymous Afghan woman wrote in The Guardian: “I did not expect that we would be deprived of all our basic rights again and travel back to 20 years ago. That after 20 years of fighting for our rights and freedom, we should be hunting for burqas and hiding our identity.”

There have been protests in the streets. Women have even taken up guns in a rare show of defiance.

Several Afghan women journalists have said they were not allowed to work by the Taliban. Shabnam Khan Dawran, an anchor at RTA (Radio Television Afghanistan), said she could not enter her office. “I wanted to return to work, but unfortunately they did not allow me to work. They told me that the regime has changed and you cannot work,” Dawran was quoted as saying by Tolo News.

Another journalist Khadija also said she was not allowed by the Taliban to enter her office. “We talked with our new director who has been appointed by the Taliban… There has been a change in the programmes. They broadcast their desired programs, there are no female presenters and female journalists,” Khadija said, according to Tolo News.

Several women have said they fear the Taliban will reinforce their strict interpretation of Sharia and would not allow them to work and stop girls from attending school. The Taliban during their first regime in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 brutally enforced their diktats and women were beaten up publicly by the group’s religious police if they did not cover their face and stepped out of their homes without being accompanied by a male relative.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has warned of “chilling” curbs on human rights under the Taliban and mounting violations against women and girls.

Freedoms granted to Afghan women will definitely be stripped away by the Taliban — despite the group’s claims that they will respect women’s rights, said a Brookings Institution researcher.

“There’s is no chance that the existing freedoms, at least as they existed on paper in the constitution … will be preserved,” Vanda Felbab-Brown told CNBC.

“Thousands of women put their lives at risk over the last two decades to advance the rights of women and girls across Afghanistan, many of whom helped the U.S. mission,” Gayatri Patel, vice president for external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said in a Sunday statement. “The Biden administration has a moral obligation to ensure they are evacuated and safely resettled.”

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, founder and chief executive of the International Civil Society Action Network, which has partner organizations in Afghanistan, said she had received reports in recent days that women who tried to go to work at public-facing jobs in the western city of Herat were told to return home.

Reports have emerged in recent days of families being forced to hand over their daughters to marry Taliban fighters in areas controlled by the militant group. Taliban spokesman Mujahid called the allegations false, the Wall Street Journal reported.

However, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen earlier said that the group had been allowing women and girls to pursue education in areas they had taken over. Pressed about reports from Herat that Taliban fighters turned away women who tried to enter the university there over the weekend, Shaheen insisted that such behavior violated Taliban policy and individual allegations would be investigated.

In a tweet on Monday, Mohammad Naeem, spokesman for the Taliban’s political office, posted a video he said depicted a Taliban-aligned scholar telling a hospital’s medical staff, including women, to continue working as usual.

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