How the West has deserted us Afghan ladies to the Taliban

Even from many metres away in the crowded passageway of my local bazaar I could hear the voices of the Taliban.

Clad in their traditional robes and wielding automatic weapons, they were pulling people aside and questioning their business there, one of the arbitrary spot checks aimed at rooting out those who dare to break their oppressive rules.

I was accompanied by my brother – my ‘mahram’, or guardian – for single women like me are unable even to shop for groceries without a male chaperone. As Taliban rules also demand, I was covered from head to toe in my burka despite the stifling 30c heat.

Nonetheless, I still nudged my brother and gestured with a nod to him that we should quickly return home – the only way I could communicate with him as a new law introduced last month has banned women from speaking in public.

For encountering the Taliban is not worth the risk: however much you think you have complied with their evermore stifling demands, they find ways to brutalise you. We know of a woman who was sent to prison, and her husband tortured, because when they were stopped and questioned about what they had for lunch that day they gave ­different answers.

Even buying medicine for your sick child is no armour against their ­cruelty. Desperate for medicine for her sick son, a widowed friend was ‘caught’ at the bazaar alone. She was given a draconian fine, and told that next time she would be physically punished.

This is the reality of life in ­Afghanistan in 2024. A world where women have lost all their basic human rights and freedoms since the Taliban took control three years ago.

We are banned from schools, offices, public baths, parks, and gyms. When we dare to step outside the confines of our homes, there must not be a single bit of our body or face visible apart from our eyes – through a mesh covering – and we must be accompanied by our husband or a male family member.

Reduced to nothing more than ­domestic chattels, we find the ­boundaries of our lives shrunken to the four walls of our family home. Banned from looking directly at men we are not related to by blood or marriage, we have now even been robbed of the one thing left to us – our voice.

As the new law tells us: ‘Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face and body.’

Those who do disobey risk being fined if they are ‘lucky’ – and flogged or jailed if they aren’t. It is why the internet is the only way left for us to communicate, the ­predominant emotion among Afghan women young and old is fear and despair.

The older generation weep for their daughters who in turn see no hope for the future after being abandoned by Western democracies which have stood by while everything has been taken from us. This is why I am speaking out, although I must ­disguise my story, as ­anyone who dares to exposes the reality of life under the Taliban regime will feel the full weight of their punishment. Earlier this year, the Taliban spies managed to track down a woman who gave an anonymous interview to an American television network. She has since disappeared.

I can say I am a woman in her mid-twenties who, before the ­Taliban returned to power, had a happy life in my small city. I worked in IT, and my salary helped support my extended family. I still lived at home and while I did not have a sweetheart, I hoped, even assumed I would marry for love.

In the meantime, I enjoyed many of life’s simple pleasures: ­picnics in the park, meeting friends in cafés.

How could I have known how quickly these freedoms would be taken from us when the Taliban swept back again?

My mother knew: I remember her choking sobs as we huddled around our television set and watched their fighters riding through the streets of Kabul.

My sister and I clung onto hope; over WhatsApp groups, we speculated feverishly this time would be different. We thought perhaps just a few small things would change, that we could continue to work and go to school.

Not once did we think it would be even worse, and today I could weep at that ­astonishing naivety, for it took only weeks to realise that the Taliban’s intention was to slowly erase women, ­systemically stripping them of their rights.

What they want of us is to stay home, cooking and ­cleaning for a husband who may have many wives, raising their ­children and obeying their every instruction.

Since the Taliban returned to power, they have issued nearly a hundred mandates restricting our freedoms, banishing us from the workplace and education.

Last year, they ordered the ­closure of all beauty salons, one of the only remaining ways for women to earn an income. I know of a widow in another city who has no choice but to work surreptitiously in ­neighbour’s houses, leaving her home under cover of darkness.

She has no other way of feeding her five children, but lives in fear of being caught. ‘The torment is constant,’ she told me in a text message. ‘It is all I have, the anxiety of not knowing if we’ll have enough to eat tomorrow, or if my secret attempts to work will bring harm to my family.’

The financial consequences of women’s abolition from the ­workplace cannot be overstated. In my home, only my brother is now able to work, without the income that I and my sister brought in, we have had to make a strict timetable to make every tiny bit of food last as long as possible.

Gone are the cakes and any other small luxuries. Now we exist on rice and other basics, and cannot eat every day.

In a country where there is a chronic shortage of food, all of us have become used to the feeling of an aching empty stomach.

Even men have found their ­livelihoods affected.

One of my friend’s husbands is a shopkeeper, but his income has plunged since the women who could once pop in while passing can now not enter his shop without a mahram to ask for goods by pointing rather than speaking.

The Taliban have visited him more than once to warn him that if they hear that a woman has come in alone they will close his shop.

Another friend who was at ­university and who dreamed of opening her own business has retrained as a midwife, the only ‘job’ left to women in Afghanistan, although it pays very little.

She has no interest in the work, but told me that it at least allowed her to help her family, as well as leave the house and mingle with other women – although she must be careful: earlier this year three female health workers were detained because they were ­traveling to work without a male chaperone.

But then, the Taliban’s dreaded morality police are everywhere. They conduct spot checks on our homes, to make sure we are living under their laws, while random checkpoints spring up overnight.

If you answer questions the ‘wrong’ way, you can be sent to jail, and men who are considered to not have their women under control are tortured. It takes so little to be a dissident, and anyone who once worked for the ‘infidels’, as any western business or agency is seen, remains a target.

A friend who once worked for a European NGO was told by a ­Taliban fighter that her disloyalty could only be compensated for by ­marrying him.

When she refused, her brother was brutally beaten at a Taliban checkpoint, and she was run over by a car in the street leaving her hospitalised for a month. Terrified, she went into hiding until some contacts in the UK helped her and her family to escape.

Escape is not possible for most people though. Fathers must stand by as their daughters – some barely teenagers, are sold into marriage to older men who repulse them.

In the past few months I have seen it happen to two family friends, young girls both married to men they had never even set eyes on before they exchanged vows. On her wedding night, one of them was beaten by her new ­husband because she had cried.

I know her father cried, too: her marriage was the price he paid for one less mouth to feed. For both girls, the best they can hope for is that their husbands do not tire of them.

Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced the reintroduction of the public flogging and stoning of women for adultery, and they are only too aware that as a man’s word is prized over that of any woman, they do not have to do anything wrong to find themselves cast out to their deaths.

As one friend told me: ‘Even when I can go out with my husband, I do not want to. I feel frightened the moment I step out of my house.’

Is it any wonder we feel like caged birds? Our days rest heavy on us, trapped in our homes. We try to keep busy with ­domestic chores or reading – and even then only ‘approved’ books – but there are too many hours in the day.

Now that under the new rules our voices are also deemed to be instruments of vice, we cannot even speak freely indoors. If a passing Taliban hears singing, or loud reading, this too is an offence. We must speak softly at all times, even when reciting the Quran.

It means the sound I hear most in my home is not laughter, or excited chatter, but soft crying, because we cannot see any way out.

Our only lifeline is our WhatsApp groups, although we are careful what we say, because we cannot be sure the Taliban’s spies are not monitoring them somehow. I know that more than one teenage girl has tried to take her own life rather than face a future in which she has no hope.

It is the lack of hope that is hardest, in fact. The West remained silent when they banned our ­education, silent as they took away all our other freedoms, too.

Now we have lost our voice, and again the West does not raise theirs. It means there is nothing left for us.