Afghan Women Have Been Brought Back in Time

Mariam was 12 years old when a relative sold her into a marriage with a 40-year-old soldier in the Taliban, who was already married. She was repeatedly sexually and physically assaulted. By the time she was 19, she had four children. Mariam’s story is not unusual; her four sisters each had similar experiences, as have countless other Afghan women. I know this all too well—I was born in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s first regime, and left the country when the United States withdrew its troops in 2021. I have friends who still live there. (Mariam is not a real name; like many of the women I spoke with for this story, this person asked me to protect her identity for fear of retribution.)

The events of recent years have been a terrible form of whiplash. After the 2001 U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban and a democratic government was established, new women’s-rights advocacy groups proliferated. With their help, Mariam was eventually able to leave the marriage. Millions of other Afghan women experienced new freedoms in those years. The government reopened the schools and universities for women. Under the new constitution, women were guaranteed the right to work, vote, and participate in public life. The Ministry of Women was created to protect these rights. Now, though, Mariam is once again living under a Taliban regime, this time with even more oppressive rules. “Every morning we are waking up with a new Taliban rule limiting us in every way they could; rules for our body, hair, education, and now our voices,” Mariam told me. “If the Taliban continues, Afghanistan will soon become a graveyard for women and young girls, and the world will just watch.”

[Ian Fritz: What I learned while eavesdropping on the Taliban]

The question Mariam and other Afghan women are now asking is whether the international community will come to their aid once again. In August, the Taliban issued a 114-page, 35-article set of restrictive laws, approved by their supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. The document takes many basic freedoms away from the country’s women, prohibiting them from singing publicly or looking at men other than their husband and relatives, and requiring them to cover their bodies and faces in public. Many of these restrictions have been enforced since the Taliban took control of the government in August 2021, but until now, they were not the official law.

For weeks, there was little sign that the international community would step in. But last month, in a historic move, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands filed a case against the Taliban under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This case will take the Taliban to the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. It is the first time that a group of countries has taken another nation to the ICJ for CEDAW violations. The Taliban now has six months to respond to the complaint. For the Afghan women I spoke with, the new case is an important step toward justice. “This is great progress to end gender apartheid and persecution,” said Muhiba Ruzbehan, 46, who lived under the first Taliban regime and now works in medicine in London. Many of them consider the mere filing of the lawsuit an achievement, but what they want is a favorable ruling from the International Court of Justice. Until then, a lawsuit is just a lot of paper.

For many who lived during the Taliban’s first regime, the newly instated laws are frightening flashbacks to the brutal rules of the late ’90s. Back then, Ruzbehan served as a doctor’s assistant in a Taliban military hospital. She saw women whose hands had been cut off, brought in for treatment by Taliban commanders proud of their abuse. She saw women who had been flogged and seriously injured for merely speaking with a man. She saw bodies of women who had been stoned to death for adultery. “I am deeply heartbroken and disappointed to see the Taliban’s second term is even more radical compared to their first regime,” she told me.

[From the September 2022 issue: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

Younger women who don’t remember the earlier regime are now experiencing a constrained life they had long heard about from their mother and grandmothers. I spoke with Salehi, 27, who is from Badakhshan, the northeasternmost province of Afghanistan. When the Taliban banned women from certain kinds of work in December 2022, she lost her job as a data-entry clerk. Salehi was terrified by the Taliban’s new laws, and fearful of worse yet to come. “Dying is better for us rather than living with these limitations,” she told me.

Hamida, 28, is a women’s-rights advocate living in Kabul. She is not married, and lives on her own. She told me that the Taliban’s laws are making her life extremely hard. She fears that if the country’s leaders find out she has no husband, they will force her to marry, or send her back to her family in nearby Bamyan, which would mean the end of many things she hoped for and worked hard for.

Ever since the U.S. left the country in 2021, millions of Afghan women have felt abandoned by the international community. The Taliban’s laws have violated their basic human rights day in and day out. But the women I spoke with told me that although the Taliban has brought back the oppression of its first regime, not all is the same. They—the women—have changed. They attended school and experienced living under a democratic government. They know they have rights. The new case at the ICJ, they pray, is a sign that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world knows this too.