RAWA NEWS:The people of Farah have endured a myriad of social, economic, and cultural challenges for over four decades, and similar to the residents of other provinces, never enjoyed freedom, prosperity, and welfare. However, in the past couple of years, under the oppressive rule of the Taliban, these difficulties have escalated. The impoverished population, mostly daily wage laborers and farmers, are tackling a triple threat of hardships - psychological, economic, and drought - like three deadly misfortunes. Full story ...
U.S. Department of State:The United States has not decided whether to recognize the Taliban or any other entity as the government of Afghanistan or as part of such a government. All references to “the pre-August 2021 government” refer to the Republic-era government of Afghanistan. References to the Taliban in this report do not denote or imply that the United States recognizes the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.There was significant deterioration in women’s rights during the year due to edicts that further restricted access to education and employment, with a net result that women were increasingly confined to domestic roles. No decree or directive pertaining to women and girls’ education, or work, was reversed or softened. The Taliban did not purport to formally change existing laws as legislated by the Republic-era government; however, they promulgated edicts that contradicted those laws and were inconsistent with Afghanistan’s obligations under international conventions. Full story ...
BBC News: Teenage Afghan girls have told the BBC they feel “mentally dead” as the Taliban’s ban on their education prevents them from returning to school once again.More than 900 days have now passed since girls over 12 were first banned. The Taliban have repeatedly promised they would be readmitted once a number of issues were resolved - including ensuring the curriculum was “Islamic”. But they have made little comment as a third new school year started without teenage girls in class this week. Full story ...
UN Women News: Since August 2021, Afghan women and girls have been grappling with increasingly restrictive decrees limiting their participation in all aspects of social, economic, and political life. These have confined millions of women to their home, restricting their important contributions to society. Their already dire situation has been compounded in recent months by humanitarian crises. First, devastating earthquakes rocked western Afghanistan in October 2023. Then, since November 2023, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been forced to return after a Pakistani decree on undocumented migrants went into effect. According to International Organization for Migration (IOM) data, an estimated 80 per cent of those affected are women and children. Full story ...
The Washington Post: Their names are Khoshbakht, Saliha, Fawzia, Benazir, Farzana and Nazia — Afghan girls ages 6 to 10 who have been sold into marriage. Desperation forced their parents to thrust them into brutal adulthood. In Shahrak-e-Sabz, a settlement of makeshift mud-brick homes and tents for the displaced in Herat province that we visited last month, our researchers counted 118 girls who had been sold as child brides, and 116 families with girls waiting for buyers. This amounts to 40 percent of families surveyed, even though the Taliban decreed in late 2021... Full story ...
The Washington Post: Afghanistan’s primary mental health facility in Kabul has filled with patients who say they are experiencing a different kind of suffering, he said. With the Taliban leadership severely restricting female education and work, there are mounting concerns about the mental health of girls and women. The restrictions and “sudden changes,” said Azim, appear to be at the root of the trauma suffered by most women and girls now seeking help at this hospital. Full story ...
Devdiscourse: "One of the most illustrative examples of the systematic discrimination against women and girls in Afghanistan today is the relentless issuance of edicts, decrees, declarations and directives restricting their rights, including their freedom of movement, attire and behaviour, and their access to education, work, health and justice," Full story ...
UN News: Following a systematic crackdown on the rights of Afghan women and girls by the Taliban – from attending school to working at the UN – “the stage may be set for multiple preventable deaths that could amount to femicide” unless restrictions are reversed rapidly, independent UN human rights experts announced on Friday, following an eight-day visit to the country. Full story ...
Fraqnce24: In the latest example of public punishments carried out by the Taliban, two men were forced to wear a chador, a full-length hijab traditionally worn by women as a form of public "humiliation". But other punishments meted out by the Taliban have been far more violent, including flagellations and public executions. While Afghan activists have documented dozens of public punishments since October 2022, video evidence of them is scarce – only two videos document these brutal tactics. Full story ...
CNN: Young Afghan women gathered outside Kabul University on Monday to protest the ruling Taliban’s ban on female education as their male peers returned to school for a new academic year and the United Nations heard the restriction may amount to a crime against humanity. A video shared widely on social media shows a group of girls sitting on the ground outside Kabul University reading their books. CNN has not independently verified when the video was filmed. Full story ...
The Guardian: It is six weeks since the Taliban closed the door on girls’ education across Afghanistan and Zeina’s last vestiges of hope for her future died. A very different kind of life now lies ahead for the 20-year-old, a life of domestic drudgery, boredom and seclusion that she has no power to change. Since the Taliban took control in August 2021, Zeina had managed to convince her frightened family to let her stay at school. She held on to the belief that she would somehow find a way to finish her education and achieve her dream of getting a master’s in medicine. This dream has now ended. Full story ...
Rukhshana: Eleven people, including a woman, have been whipped and sent to jail in Kandahar and badakhshan provinces after being accused of crimes including adultery, sodomy, and robbery. The Taliban provincial office in Kandahar said in a newsletter on Tuesday that they have flogged nine people in Ahmadshahi Stadium. Full story ...
Zan Times: Shazia is seven years old, the age when Afghan children start school. But an education isn’t an option for Shazia, who lives in Kandahar city, the spiritual home of the Taliban. A month ago, her father forced her to marry a 22-year-old member of the Taliban, a relative tells Zan Times. “One day after the wedding, Shazia was whimpering and wanted Full story ...
OCHA: People in Afghanistan are no strangers to hardships, having endured 40 years of conflict, poverty, displacement, drought and the COVID-19 pandemic. The country is now also facing a failing health system and an economy on the brink of collapse. Even before the Taliban entered the capital, Kabul, on 15 August, the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan was one of the worst in the world. Nearly half of the country’s 40 million people, or 18.4 million people, already needed humanitarian assistance. One in three Afghans faces food insecurity, and more than half of all children under age 5 are likely to face acute malnutrition. Full story ...
RAWA News: Afghanistan under the brutal rule of the Taliban is a big prison and slaughterhouse for its women and girls. The past one year was a complete catastrophe for Afghan women in every field of life. However, Afghan women were in the forefront of the fight for justice and their rights. Despite being suppressed, tortured and jailed, they continue to voice their opposition to Taliban and their Full story ...
Al Jazeera : Herat, Afghanistan – The last time Aalam Gul Jamshidi saw her daughter was the night the 16 year old was married off to a man more than twice her age. Aziz Gul looked radiant in a sequinned, white wedding dress and a bright yellow headscarf, but there was fear in her otherwise solemn expressions. “If I go there, I’ll be sacrificed,” her mother remembers her daughter pleading that night last October. Full story ...
Global Citizen: Efforts to erase women and girls from everyday life in Afghanistan have only increased one year since the Taliban took over the government on Aug. 15, 2021. Women and girls continue to face restrictions on their basic human rights imposed by the Sunni Islamist militant group for the first time since 2001. Traces of two decades of women’s hard-earned rights hardly remain amid an economic crisis, drought, and oppressive mandates. Full story ...
Amnesty International: The lives of women and girls in Afghanistan are being devastated by the Taliban’s crackdown on their human rights, Amnesty International said in a new report published today. Since they took control of the country in August 2021, the Taliban have violated women’s and girls’ rights to education, work and free movement; decimated the system of protection and support for those fleeing domestic violence; detained women and girls for minor violations of discriminatory rules; and contributed to a surge in the rates of child, early and forced marriage in Afghanistan. Full story ...
VOA: For several months Pashtana kept rejecting marriage proposals made for her 14-year-old daughter, Zarghona, until she had to make a final decision. “I had to choose between the survival of my four little children and giving Zarghona to marriage,” Pashtana told VOA over the phone from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, where last year her husband, an army soldier, was killed Full story ...
The Washington Post: HERAT, Afghanistan — Without work, Khangul Sadiqi found himself heavily in debt. His children often went to bed hungry, shivering in their unheated home. And so, six months into Taliban rule, he began to see his three girls through the prism of survival. “Rather than all of my family members die, I decided it’s better to sell one of my girls to save the rest,” Sadiqi said. The daughter he sold is Zahra. She is 3 years old. Her buyer is a wealthy man in search of another wife. He is 50. The cost of the sale: roughly $500. Full story ...
UN News: The United Nations children’s Fund (UNICEF) has received credible reports of families in Afghanistan offering daughters as young as 20 days old for future marriage in return for a dowry. In a statement released on Friday, the agency’s Executive Director, Henrietta Fore, said that she was “deeply concerned” over reports that Full story ...
AlJazeera: The UN envoy for Afghanistan says the country is “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe”, urging the international community to find ways to provide financial support to the Afghan people, who “feel abandoned”. Deborah Lyons said an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan’s 38 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger in a food emergency that will Full story ...
Radio Liberty: Life has become a nightmare of despair for 22-year-old Maryam Rezaei since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan less than three months ago.In early August, before the Taliban stormed into her neighborhood in the western city of Herat, Rezaei was among more than 10,000 women who were studying at Herat University.She also earned money as a journalist at a local radio station.But no Full story ...
...as they play jump rope in a dusty clearing.But Parwana's laughter disappears as she returns home, a small hut with dirt walls, where she's reminded of her fate: she's being sold to a stranger as a child bride.... Full story ...
BBC: In a matter of weeks, the birthing unit Rabia delivered her baby in had been stripped down to its bare basics. She was given no pain relief, no medicine and no food.The hospital sweltered in temperatures topping 43C (109F) - the power had been cut and there was no fuel to work the generators. "We were sweating like we were taking a shower," says Rabia's midwife Abida, who worked tirelessly Full story ...
Medya News: These past few days, we have witnessed on our television screens and social media, images of the Taliban having swept through Afghanistan and on the 15th August, walked into the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul and straight into the Presidential Palace without any resistance after the withdrawal of the US forces just a few weeks before. Full story ...
The New York Times: HERAT, Afghanistan — Amid the bustle of beggars and patients outside the crowded hospital here, there are sellers and buyers, casting wary eyes at one another: The poor, seeking cash for their vital organs, and the gravely ill or their surrogates, looking to buy. Full story ...
ARAB NEWS: LONDON/KABUL: Born in exile, she died in exile. But during the 10 controversial years she spent as queen of Afghanistan, Soraya Tarzi gave the women of her country a tantalizing glimpse of an emancipated future which, a century on, has yet to be fully realized. Full story ...
The National: The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic is pushing Afghan children into early marriage or labour work and away from education. Few children in Afghanistan have suffered severe coronavirus-related health issues, but pandemic-induced economic hardships expose families to inequalities that many richer countries don’t face. Full story ...
On May 28, 2020, Human Rights Watch launched a survey to learn more about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on students, parents and caregivers. As of June 6, people in 54 countries had completed the survey; it’s still open here—please fill it out! The following dispatches highlight some of the themes that have come through most strongly, and we’ll keep adding to this page. The survey is helping us identify issues of concern and hear from people experiencing them—any data is not intended to be representative of the experiences of the broader population. Full story ...