Kabul Streets Swallow Women
Women are being hunted, rounded up like criminals in Kabul and we, the world, are watching in silence. This is NOT mere moral policing. It is gender apartheid.
In the last few days, the Taliban have abducted scores of Afghan women from the streets, markets, restaurants, and even hospitals. From Shahr-e Naw to Dasht-e Barchi, Qala-e-Fathullah, Kote Sangi, Reg Rishan and Taimani, the message is clear: if you are a woman in public, you are a target.
Please read about them here:
1. Taliban Detain Dozens Of Young Women In Kabulâs Shahr-e Naw Area
2. Taliban Detain Dozens Of Young Women In Western Kabul Amid Renewed Crackdown
3. Taliban Detain Dozens Of Young Women In Kabulâs Districts 5 & 10
Women wearing the hijab were dragged away without explanation. No justification, formal statements or rights. Only oppression, silence, violence, and fear. Families donât know where their daughters are. Some were released after pledging not to walk freely again.
From the Gender Index 2024 of Afghanistan by UN Women, please read what and who PVPV is which is responsible for this gender purge atrocity. One woman asks them: âYouâve already deprived us of life, education, and going to school. What more do you want? Fear God!â
Since the Talibanâs return to power, every promise they made to the international community about ârespecting womenâs rights within Islamic lawâ has proven hollow. Girls barred from schools. Women banned from universities. Female NGO workers stopped from working. Women erased from the government. Now, even a stroll to buy bread, visit family, or seek medical care has become a gamble with freedom.
The Talibanâs so-called Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) is a tool of repression disguised in the language of morality. This regime seeks to unmake women as visible beings. To keep them behind walls, voiceless, invisible. It is nothing less than an attempt to erase half the population from public life.
Please do not believe for a moment that this is governance. Itâs a regime of subjugation and humiliation. Women in Kabul today live under surveillance, they live under siege.
Please think about who will write their petitions of heabus corpus? Where is the ink of justice for them? Where is the holy parchment for them?
And where is the international outrage? Where are the statements, the summits, the sanctions? Where are the boycotts? Where are the diplomatic consequences? Where are the UN resolutions with teeth? Where are the safe pathways out for women in danger? This is a pattern of state-sponsored terror against women, unfolding week after week, while the world scrolls past.
To the Taliban: Afghan women are not afraid of you. You beat them. You cage them. But you have never broken them. You fear their presence because it exposes your weakness. You are and will always be on the wrong side of history and your country because you choose to erase the diverse, deserving, and dignified lives of women and girls. You fear their freedom because it shows the truth: you are afraid of a woman who walks freely, thinks freely, dreams freely.
To the rest of us: If your feminism doesnât extend to these women, itâs not feminism. If your human rights work excludes Afghanistan, itâs not justice. If you don't ask your leaders to question this de facto totalitarian authority in Afghanistan, then you are complicit. If you think of justifying the plight of Afghan women and girls using the argument of culture and tradition, you are complicit. Afghan women have not broken. Let us not break our word to them.
We see whatâs happening. We wonât forget who chooses to speak and who does not. And we will keep speaking, because Afghan women have already lost enough. They will not lose their voice. This is not an isolated incident. It is not the first time. It will not be the last unless the world breaks its collective silence. These women are not passive victims. They are resisting in ways, big and small, for every step they take in public. They are the bravest among us. These women are not faceless statistics. They have names, hopes, families, jokes, heartbreaks, dreams bigger than the mountains that surround their cities. They deserve better than to be hidden, abducted, silenced. When history writes its pages, as it always does, let it not find us on the side of the scroll-past and the turned-away. Let it find us on the side of the voices that refused to be quiet, that carried these womenâs stories into every hall of power, every courtroom, every household that dares to call itself free.