The meaning of being a woman in Afghanistan nowadays

We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan, we’ll die slowly in history. No one cares about us.

The voice of this young girl, the protagonist of a viral video, shared via Twitter by the Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, who between tears describes the horror and fear of the return of the Taliban in the country is a punch in the stomach. It’s an overwhelming pain that screams louder and louder each time a new testimony comes to describe the darkness and unknown future of Afghan women. 

In just 10 days, as the provinces capitulated under the control of the religious fundamentalists led by Haiabatullah Akhunzada and their laws, that white flag with black writing that now flies over the presidential palace in Kabul has swept away every small achievement obtained after 2001, when the fall of the Islamic regime had allowed the weakening of the limitations imposed on women. Or at least that is what many people think will happen soon, marking a return to the fundamentalist and misogynistic Middle Ages which ruled twenty years ago. The daily routine that lies ahead is the same that characterized the period from 1996 to 2001 and that is perfectly summarized by the Huffington Post:

Women were not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a male guardian. The burqa was mandatory, they could not wear makeup, nail polish or jewelry. They could not work, attend school. They could not laugh. Contact with men was filtered in every way. Not only clothes covered every part of the body: the gaze could not cross that of a man, neither they could hold the hand of the opposite sex. Invisible, imperceptible, erased to the point of having to limit the noise produced while moving: the noise of heels was banned in July 1997. The limitations were accompanied by exemplary punishments in case of transgression, with amputations and death sentences carried out in public. So many in those years committed suicide.

Now, as then, their lives are more in danger than ever. And the promises made by Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen in an interview with the BBC are not enough to reassure women that they have nothing to fear, that "their right to education and work remains", that "they can lead a normal life" and join society "within the Islamic law".

Image from Twitter

Image from Twitter

Image from Twitter

Image from Twitter

The facts reported by worldwide media show a scenario so disturbing and atrocious to fade even the dystopian future of Handmaid’s Tale. The many reports speak of "girls taken away by force, forced to marry men they have never seen"; of denied access to schools and universities; of women removed from their workplaces; of female students who hide the documents proving their matriculation at university and any other sign of empowerment, forced to replace make-up and clothes with chadari, the Afghan burqa. 

An 26-year-old Afghan journalist confesses to La Repubblica:

They are going around the streets, asking women what their names are and what their jobs are. They will kill us all. And if they don't, they will throw us back under the burqa, which is a bit like dying slowly.

A university student tells The Guardian:

As a woman, I feel like I am the victim of this political war that men started. I felt like I can no longer laugh out loud, I can no longer listen to my favourite songs, I can no longer meet my friends in our favourite cafe, I can no longer wear my favourite yellow dress or pink lipstick. And I can no longer go to my job or finish the university degree that I worked for years to achieve.

Photographer Rada Akbar echoes her on Twitter: 

With every city collapsing, human bodies collapse, dreams collapse, history and future collapse, art and culture collapse, life and beauty collapse, our world collapse. someone please stop this.

So the images of men erasing from billboards and store windows the posters depicting women whose look does not conform to sharia law, become the mirror of the fate of the Afghan female population.

Image from Twitter

Image from Twitter

Image from Twitter

There are people who point out that although the fall of the regime in 2001 has made women visible again, abolishing the burqa, granting them the right to vote and to education or putting their names on their children’s identity cards since last year (women’s names do not appear either in documents or on gravestones in cemeteries), Afghanistan is considered the worst place to be born if you are a woman and the road to concrete emancipation was still long. What may seem like small achievements, for a new generation of Afghan girls who grew up going to school and cultivating dreams of freedom were a reality that gave them not only hope, but the inviolable right to take up place. Hope that the resurgence of the Islamic Emirate is sweeping away. When at the end of this month of August, the last U.S. troops will leave the state, as U.S. President Joe Biden said, "Afghans will have to fight for themselves." Reading such sentences and the shocking testimonies that remind us that the obscurantist vision of Islam adopted by the Taliban wants to be subjugated, enslaved, invisible, we feel growing outrage, anger and a sense of helplessness. 

What can we do for Afghan women? Keep the focus on them, share their stories and support the non-profit organizations that have healthcare and empowerment projects in Afghanistan, from Emergency to Medici Senza Frontiere, from CISDA (Coordinamento Italiano Sostegno Donne Afghan) to  Learn Afghan, up to Fondazione Pangea, one of the first to alert about the current situation, which in recent hours is committed to safeguarding the lives of activists and collaborators from the reactions of the Taliban, erasing any name or information that testifies to their work of empowerment.  

We need to plan humanitarian corridors, we need to save women, families, the staff who work with us. We have asked to repatriate 280 people and we still don’t know anything. - Simona Lanzoni, vice-president of Pangea, explains to La Repubblica - To fight the Taliban we must create an alternative and this is represented by women. It is not by keeping women in ignorance, in total servitude that this country will change, we must save them to create a new generation of strong women. If it takes, we will do it from afar. I hope I don’t see the same scenes as then, women raped, stoned to death, early marriages, and to think that they can do that to the staff you've been working with for 20 years, it’s devastating.