When Kabul fell to the Taliban, India and the world watched in horror. But, for me, the news hit home. I was sitting among Afghans who have become like family, in an Afghan household in the UK, where I have been staying as a guest of a dear friend for the past few months.
Amir is from Herat and the day the Taliban captured his city he told me that it was only a matter of time before they took the country. A few days earlier his sister Rahema had fled home along with her two teenage daughters for Kabul, where like thousands of others, she hoped to find sanctuary. And possibly a way out of the country.
At present Rahema and her girls are laying low. The family had applied for an Indian visa in the first week of August, but now they can only hope and wait for a safe passage to open up. By phone, she said to me, “I am very scared and worried for my daughters because we have heard that Taliban take young girls away and marry them forcefully. I am desperate to get out, but I haven’t got a visa yet.”
Rahema, 35, who spent her childhood and adolescence in Iran as a refugee, returned to Afghanistan only in 2001 after the US invaded the country and toppled the earlier Taliban regime. That same year her older daughter Negar was born. Negar, who is fluent in German and is in her third year at university, couldn’t bring herself to talk other than to say that she was very scared.
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Like many young Afghans, she has grown up in an Afghanistan that is very different — at least in so far as urban spaces are concerned — from the state it was in 20 years ago. She and her friends are all educated, confident and openly aspirational and none of them can quite believe how their lives have been upended, seemingly in a day.
When the Taliban took hold of Herat, Rahema told me, a group of women went up to a Talib leader to ask him what was now expected of them. After a great deal of prevarication, he answered, “women should stay at home and look after their children because a lot of youngsters have become impolite. Why, don’t you want Sharia law?”
Negar’s social media post.
Still, Negar is defiant and her social media handle shows as much. On her page she has displayed a photo of an Afghan woman with her face muzzled by the Afghan flag while another one in a blue burkha is pulled on a leash by a gun-toting Talib.
The caption below reads, “We will not go back!”
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Maryam Sama, 29, a female MP, told me that the Taliban has not changed at all. But they have become astute.
“In front of the media, they will say that they will let women study. But nobody trusts them. As a cover they say, we follow Islam. But what this means is not defined.”
“They will go back to what they did before, and this time they are shrewder. They don’t want to clearly say what they will do and what they stand for. In the beginning, they will solidify their base and then we will see what they’ll do.”
But even in these early days, trying though they are, the Taliban is unable to conceal their odious nature.
In Herat, there were reports of women being turned away from university and told to get married at ages as low as 12-15. And even if female presenters have, for the time being, returned on Tolo news – a private channel which previously broadcast game shows, soap operas and talent contests – what this means, or how long such concessions might last is anybody’s guess. Tolo TV said there was a little bit of uncertainty at the time about what would happen next and has temporarily removed their female presenters.
When I asked MP Maryam Sama as to whether any resistance might come from within society seeing as so much has changed in the past two decades – as per the UN, as of February 2021, 27% of seats in parliament were held by women – she told me that girls’ school enrolment has gone up from a dismal 9,000 in the year 2000 to 3.5 million today — her response was discouraging.
“People are afraid of the Taliban,” she said. “Because firstly everybody is shocked after seeing the government fall. And second, our society is deeply patriarchal. So, a brother will not support his sister saying that I stand with you for your right to work and study. The UN has recorded an increasing trend of violence against women in Afghanistan and now it will only get worse.”
“Still,” she added hopefully, “We will continue our resistance as best we can. I have to have hope.”
Women protesting against the Taliban in Kabul. Photo: Author provided.
She directed me to a video that emerged on Twitter a day after the Taliban seized power. A group of local women held up placards in plain sight of Taliban militants.
Their message read:
“We want our rights. Women exist. We want social and political security. We want the right to work, the right to education and the right to political participation. No military can ignore women and choke our throats. All of our achievements built over years should not be trampled!”
Nevertheless, her fears are well-founded. In 2015, a mob set upon a woman, Farkhunda, who was falsely accused of burning the Quran. Men beat her, ran over her with a car, dragged her body and burned her.
“One of the many troubling aspects of Farkhunda’s murder [was] that her killers were not religious extremists, but ordinary Afghans,” Zarghuna Kargar of the BBC observed, even “if a couple of days later thousands of women and men marched through Kabul, chanting “We are all Farkhunda!” and demanding justice”.
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Sahar Fetrat, an Afghan feminist and War Studies student at King’s College, London, agreed that the rise of the Taliban will embolden patriarchal elements in society.
“This is just the beginning,” she said her voice reflecting pain and anger. “I have so many different emotions. Helplessness. A sense of rage. Rage at our president and our countrymen. Rage at our government and how shamefully they fled. And I have anger against the world. Especially the US and its allies who just used us — especially women.”
“When the US invaded Afghanistan, aside from eradicating terrorism, another big justification was saving Afghan women,” she said. “This narrative was used throughout. And it’s not like the US came and we got everything. We suffered a lot. I was 6 years old when the US invaded Afghanistan and I remember how happy my parents were when the Taliban were removed.”
The first talks about the US leaving Afghanistan started during the Obama administration, as far back as 2011, something President Biden himself reiterated in his July 8, 2021 speech on US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“In 2011, the NATO Allies and partners agreed that we would end our combat mission in 2014.” In 2014, some argued, “One more year. So we kept fighting, and we kept taking casualties. In 2015, the same. And on and on,” Biden had said.
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And though the symbolic use of Afghan women in America’s war on terror has been well recorded, it is worth recalling Biden’s own words during that time, as per Richard Holbrooke, who was special envoy to Afghanistan in the early Obama years.
“I’m not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of [Afghan] women’s rights…That’s not what they’re there for,” Mr. Biden angrily said.
“It is the way and the speed with which this has happened that upsets me,” Sahar continued. “Even a decade back I had deep fears about what would happen once the US left. And throughout this time, for years and years, the Taliban taking over was my biggest nightmare. I would have this dream that the Taliban would take control of the airport and I would be stuck in it, unable to escape. And now I saw this actually happen! The only consolation is that I am not there.”
“I would also like to say,” Sahar added as a final comment, “that a lot of Western academics and journalists made their careers writing about Afghan women, saying that these women were victims and that we saved them. Now, where are they? I would like to stress that we fought for ourselves. We don’t owe it to them. It’s not about them saving us. It is and has always been our fight.”
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While it is primarily women who will bear the brunt of the Taliban’s draconian rules, they are not the only targets.
In my conversations with Afghans, many mentioned how the Taliban are distributing Aafw namas, or letters of forgiveness, to government personnel and others in an attempt to temper mounting fears of violent retribution. When a man asked an official at a news conference why it should not be the other way around; that is, should it not be the people of Afghanistan forgiving the Taliban for all the terror they’ve unleashed in the country, the Talib responded with platitudes.
Hasan Sharifi, a musician from Herat, Afghanistan, told me he was afraid to sign an Aafw nama as this was probably a way to track potential dissenters. With pride in his voice, the young man said he works in different genres of music, “like pop, blues and alternative rock”.
But due to the rise of the Taliban, all manner of artistes and academics are under threat and nobody knows what fate awaits them. Under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, music is forbidden and Hasan is justifiably afraid. That the Taliban recently killed a comedian in Kandhar only fuels his fears.
“The Taliban have full control in my city and a lot of fundamentalists have started to report the artistes who used to write against extremism,” he told me.
A young Heratian poet, Mehran Popal was taken away by the Taliban on August 14. He is still missing and nobody knows of his whereabouts. Mehran had stated on his Facebook page that he didn’t need Taliban’s Aafw nama as it was ordinary citizens who should be forgiving the Taliban rather than contrariwise.
“I don’t practice any religion,” Hasan told me, further echoing others’ sentiments that if this ‘Taliban 2.0’ appears somewhat moderate it is only so in front of the Western media.
“I just stand for humanity and a lot of people know and recognise me as an atheist. So this is an added danger for me. What if somebody reports me?”
He laughed sadly. “Now I have to wear traditional Afghani clothes, it is against my style. And I will also burn the tattoos on my arm so that nobody can make them out.”
When I asked Hasan what his future plans were he simply said, “I am looking for a way out. There is no choice.”
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In my last conversation, Amir’s 13-year-old cousin in Herat told me he wants to be an artist and asked to share a picture of his drawings. Like many artists, “the boy is sensitive”, his father said. He had heard so many horror stories about the Taliban that when he first glimpsed bearded militants patrolling the city’s streets he had a panic attack and had to be rushed to hospital.
Amir cousin’s drawings.
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When I hung up the phone, I turned to Amir’s mother, or maman, as I have now come to affectionately call her. She was staring out the window in deep thought.
Back in the 1990s, a young maman fled Herat with her husband taking her children to Iran with her. The family lived there for many years as refugees. When she returned to Afghanistan, she kissed the earth. Now a widow, she took to acting in TV shows and movies to support her family and for a time she even grew to become a famous actress. But her career only went so far. Taliban threatened her with death and she was forced to again flee and seek refuge in India.
From there she and some other family members eventually made their way to the UK under a refugee resettlement programme sponsored by the UNHCR.
As before, and perhaps now, more than ever before, escaping their homeland in search of a better life is the most that far too many Afghans can hope to aspire for.
Wiping tears away from her eyes, maman turned to face me.
Shaking her head with sorrow, she said, “Sab khallas.” All is finished.
Note: The interviews have been condensed for clarity, and some interviewees’ names have been changed.
Siddharth Kapila is a lawyer-turned-writer at present working on a travel memoir on Hindu pilgrimage sites.
