Afghan Women under the tyranny of the misogynist fundamentalists


Medieval restrictions imposed by Taliban on Afghan women since Aug.2021

An overview on the situation of Afghan Women
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Some of the restrictions imposed by Taliban on women (1996-2001)
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Afghan women in chains of the brutal fundamentalists
  • September 17, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Poor Kabulis survive by eating domestic animals food
    BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): Poverty in the month of Ramadan shows itself with much harsher face in the dinning cloth of most of the families in Kabul city.... The monthly income of Marzia is 1,500 Afghanis equivalent to 30 dollars which she takes from the government as her husband's pension. Once her husband has been a worker of municipality but now extremely needs to be cured and this money is even not enough for the cost of his sickness. This man already was paralyzed and now he is also suffering from mental problem and is always needs someone to take care of him.      Full news...

  • September 7, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Armed men gun down working woman in S Afghanistan
    Xinhua: Unknown armed men shot dead a woman worked outside home in Kandahar province the birthplace of Taliban in south Afghanistan on Monday, police said. "Unidentified armed men opened fire on Ms. Latifa, 21, in Kandahar city this morning, killing her on the spot," police chief of southern region Ghulam Ali Wahdat told Xinhua. Worked as in-charge of tailoring project in Women Affairs Department, the late Latifa, was on her way home when two armed men riding a motorbike opened fire and killed her.      Full news...

  • September 5, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    150 civilians dead in air raid: Villagers
    PAN: Residents of Chahar Dara district in northern Kunduz province say more than 150 civilians were killed and 20 others wounded in Friday's air strike by NATO-led forces. The bombing in Haji Aman village came as insurgents and residents emptied oil into jerry canes from tankers hijacked by Taliban militants from the Kunduz-Baghlan Highway. Inhabitants of the area told Pajhwok Afghan News all those killed in the bombardment were civilians and there were no Taliban at the site at the time the attack took place.      Full news...

  • September 3, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    AFGHANISTAN: “Differentiate rape from adultery” - rights groups
    IRIN: Human rights groups are calling on the Afghan government to adopt a new law which would more clearly differentiate rape, a criminal offence, from consensual adultery, considered a serious crime in the country. "Rape and adultery are two different issues and should be separate in law. Rape is an act of violence and coercion and the inflicting of suffering on a victim, and is not consensual, whereas adultery is consensual, freely chosen," Sonya Merkova, a researcher at London-based Amnesty International, told IRIN.      Full news...

  • August 23, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Obama’s Unspoken Trade-Off:  Dead US/NATO Occupation Troops versus Dead Afghan Civilians?
    RAWA News: Buried in the public relations blather of U.S. Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy-restored is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under George W. Bush, U.S politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge.      Full news...

  • August 14, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghanistan passes ‘barbaric’ law diminishing women’s rights
    The Guardian: Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review. The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.      Full news...

  • August 12, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Silence is Violence: End the Abuse of Women in Afghanistan
    Inter-Parliamentary Union: In early July 2009, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published a report on the situation of women in Afghanistan entitled Silence Is Violence: End the Abuse of Women in Afghanistan. The report describes and denounces the pervasive violence against women in Afghanistan, which unfortunately has been allowed to continue almost unabated since the demise of the Taliban regime and has crushed hopes for a better life for women in the country. The report focuses on sexual violence and on violence that inhibits the participation of women in public life.      Full news...

  • August 6, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Opium ravages Afghan villages
    Toronto Star: In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families – from toddlers to old men – are addicts. Cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams, the addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.      Full news...

  • August 6, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Road side bomb kill 26 in Afghanistan, including 21 members of a wedding party
    Los Angeles Times: Separate roadside bombings in volatile Helmand province today killed at least 26 people, including 21 members of a wedding party and five police officers, Afghan officials said.Also today, the U.S. military reported the death a day earlier of an American soldier in western Afghanistan. That brought the number of U.S. troops killed so far this month to seven, out of a total of 11 Western military fatalities      Full news...

  • August 2, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Students and Teachers Are Innocent
    e-Ariana: There is a common consensus that armed violence will increase across Afghanistan in the summer months, most probably into unprecedented levels since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Summers have consistently witnessed the peak of insurgency-related violence over the past seven years as insurgent fighters find the weather and the geography suitable to launch hit-and-run attacks, raid and terrorize villages, perpetuate suicide and roadside explosions, and create a situation of widespread insecurity.      Full news...

  • July 28, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Malalai Joya: The woman who will not be silenced
    The Independent: I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years – and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for.      Full news...

  • July 23, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Divorce, suicide; ‘Hell’ in Herat
    Reuters: After regular beatings, torture and attempted murder by her husband, 35-year-old Zahra tried to burn herself to death to escape her marriage. Then she learned of a safer option: divorce. Zahra is among a growing number of women in Afghanistan's western Herat province who, with the help of a women's charity, have taken on patriarchal laws to get a divorce, a taboo in the devoutly Muslim, formerly Taliban-led state.      Full news...

  • July 23, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghanistan's bravest woman brings her message to UK
    The Independent: Having survived five assassination attempts, if there is one thing the Afghan woman is, it is brave. Her story is inextricably linked to the recent history of her country. Through her own determination she has become part of its legend; first as a teacher in the refugee camps of Pakistan, then as an activist covertly running schools for girls in Herat during the Taliban years. Politicised beyond her years she was elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005 as its youngest member.      Full news...

  • July 17, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Q&A:
    IPS News: It is easy to understand why epithets such as brave and courageous often accompany the name of Malalai Joya. Slight of stature and serenely demure, the young Afghan woman’s past and present encapsulate the plight of her countrywomen. alalai Joya returned to Afghanistan in 1998 - she had spent most of her life until then in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan - as an underground volunteer educator of girls, a decidedly dangerous and difficult role given that the hardline Taliban were in power.      Full news...

  • July 17, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghan bomb kills 11, including children: police
    AFP: A Taliban bomb attack killed 11 civilians, including children and toddlers, going to a shrine in Afghanistan on Friday, police said following a surge of attacks ahead of key elections. The explosives ripped through a civilian pick-up vehicle taking a group of men, women and children to visit a centuries-old tomb in Spin Boldak district in Kandahar province, just a few kilometres (miles) from the Pakistani border. "Three women, three men and five children were killed," General Saifullah Hakim, a senior border police official, told AFP.      Full news...

  • July 16, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Airstrike killed six civilians and wounded 14 others in Afghanistan
    Reuters: The U.S. military said on Thursday it was investigating an incident in southern Afghanistan in which residents said some civilians were killed and up to 16 wounded in a possible air strike. Residents said up to six people were killed and 16 wounded in two Kandahar districts they identified as Shah Wali Kot and Miawand. Television footage taken inside Kandahar City hospital showed a number of wounded, including children, being treated.      Full news...

  • July 16, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    AFGHANISTAN: “Opium eases my pain, keeps my children quiet”
    IRIN: Tordi, 45, finally quit her opium habit after six stillborn births and delivered a healthy baby girl. “I was using opium to ease my body pains and to be able to work better,” she told IRIN in her home in the Shortapa District of northern Balkh Province. Addiction, long hours of hard labour and poor nutrition had weakened Tordi’s body so much that she almost died during her sixth delivery before her family rushed her to a district hospital.      Full news...

  • July 8, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Air raids kill 8 Afghans in S Afghanistan
    Xinhua: Air raids against suspected hideouts of Taliban militants in Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan, however, claimed the lives of eight civilians including two women, a member of the Provincial Council Abdul Nabi said Wednesday. In talks with media, Nabi added that the raids took place at 3 a.m. local time (2330 GMT) in Gero district during which eight non-combatants were killed.      Full news...

  • July 8, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    AFGHANISTAN: Call for tougher laws on rape
    IRIN: Rapists in Afghanistan too often get away with their crime, whilst rape victims lack access to justice and experience stigma and shame, according to a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). “In some areas, alleged or convicted rapists are, or have links to, powerful commanders, members of illegal armed groups, or criminal gangs, as well as powerful individuals whose influence protects them from arrest and prosecution,” said the report entitled Silence is Violence, launched in Kabul on 8 July.      Full news...

  • July 7, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    AFGHANISTAN: After the floods, malaria?
    IRIN: Stagnant water in flood-affected parts of Afghanistan is the perfect breeding ground for malaria-causing mosquitoes, health specialists warn. “We anticipate an increase in malaria cases this year,” Najibullah Safi, director of the National Malaria and Leishmaniasis Control Programme (NMLCP), told IRIN in Kabul.      Full news...

  • July 4, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghanistan: ‘The truth cannot be killed’
    Green Left Weekly: For Joya, who is currently touring Australia to promote her political autobiography Raising My Voice, it is a familiar situation. She grew up in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. She returned to Afghanistan in 1998 to engage in the extremely dangerous activity of conducting underground classes for girls. Female education was banned by the misogynist Taliban, then in power. This makes her assessment of Afghanistan today, more than seven years after it was supposedly liberated by the US-led invasion, particularly damning.      Full news...

  • June 29, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghan women battle heavy odds in struggle for freedom, dignity
    Windsor Star: Afghan women - particularly in the volatile south, where the Taliban was born - rarely appear in public without burkas and often show deference to the opposite sex, lowering gazes to the floor, almost shrinking when a man approaches. Given that some hard-line Islamists believe the Koran decrees women to be subservient to men, improving conditions for women in a war-torn country with one of the world's lowest literacy levels requires more than education. It requires social engineering.      Full news...

  • June 25, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Women Reporters Under Threat in Herat
    IWPR: Khadija Ahadi used to be the most active journalism student in town. At press conferences in Herat, she would always be there with her video camera, usually the only woman in the room. Nobody was surprised that she landed a job as the deputy editor-in-chief of Radio Faryad after her studies. But now her successful career has suddenly been stopped – by force. “Some men threatened me because I am a reporter, but initially I kept working and I didn’t tell my family because they would have stopped me,” said Ahadi, 32. “Then one day they threw two grenades in my house. I have not gone to work since.’’      Full news...

  • June 24, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Few rural women use family planning services in Afghanistan
    IRIN: Family planning services are available in over 90 percent of health facilities across Afghanistan but the number of women using them in rural areas is too low, according to the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). Hamida Ebadi, director of MoPH’s reproductive health unit, reckoned only 14-15 percent of women in rural and remote regions use family planning services. Most pregnancy-related deaths happen in remote, isolated and insecure areas of the country where people have poor access to quality health services, officials say.      Full news...

  • June 21, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Honor-Killing in Afghanistan: Father Kills His Daughter and Her Lover
    PAN (Translated by RAWA): A father brutally murdered his daughter and a young boy for having love affairs in Samangan province, Northern Afghanistan. He stabbed them many times with a knife. The girl was named Shakila and was 18 years old and the boy named Ghulam Sakhi was 22. This savage incident took place at 3 in the morning in Haji Umar Village of Aibak city (centre of Samangan).      Full news...

  • June 21, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    ‘Bravest woman in Afghanistan’
    The Washington Times: The "bravest woman in Afghanistan," in the view of her admirers, Ms. Joya has continued her defiant critique of the Afghan government two years after she was suspended from parliament for insulting her mostly male colleagues by likening them to farmyard animals."These warlords are killers, drug smugglers and dirty-minded criminals who are ruining our country, with support from the United States," she told The Washington Times in a recent interview at a safe house in Kabul. "This is a mafia regime that has betrayed its people."      Full news...

  • June 21, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Three Women Killed, 11 Injured in a Clash of NATO and Taliban
    Three women were killed and another eleven civilian injured in a clash between NATO and armed Taliban the previous day in Dare Peech of Kunar Province. According to the governor, the Afghan and NATO forces retaliated and a fight took place. Wahidi said that during the clash some of the bullets were fired in a populated area on people’s homes, as a result of which 3 women were killed and 11 others, including 6 children, were injured.      Full news...

  • June 19, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    How to Help Afghans When Congress Approves 100 Billion Dollars More in War
    Rethink Afghanistan: $100 billion, and for what? To bring more troops to Afghanistan without an exit strategy? To further US foreign policy that fails to address the humanitarian needs of the world’s third poorest country? To escalate military operations that directly result in Afghan civilian casualties?... Fortunately, there are ways to take immediate action and address Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis.      Full news...

  • June 17, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Weak become ever more vulnerable in Afghanistan
    The National: Juma Gul’s muffled crying became noticeable only when she wiped the tears away using her burqa or slumped forward with her head in her hands. Speaking Uzbek, she described how she made the equivalent of about Dh440 by selling her baby daughter off for marriage. The girl’s fiancé had memorised the Quran and his father promised that her virginity would be respected until she was an adult. The couple eventually wed four years ago, when she was eight and he was in his late twenties.      Full news...

  • June 12, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Obama’s Afghan War, the US Media, and the UN: the New Metric of Civilian Casualties
    RAWA News: A tacit agreement operates between the Obama administration, the U.S corporate media, most progressive U.S. liberals, and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA). All dream to a lesser or greater degree of a future social democratic paradise in Afghanistan where girls’ schools would be flourishing and small farmers exporting pomegranates. Some debate exists over the means to achieve this end. Much ado has been made during the past five months as to whether the Obama approach to Afghanistan differs or not with that of its predecessor.      Full news...

  • June 9, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghan woman who attempted suicide: “Self-immolation is the worst”
    IRIN: Attempts to set oneself on fire (self-immolation) are an extreme reaction often practiced by desperate women who lack access to justice and protection. Anargul, 25, set herself ablaze in Herat Province, western Afghanistan, in a bid to end her misery, and ended up with burns to her chest, belly, neck, hands and face. She told IRIN about her ordeal and why her attempted suicide has worsened her plight.      Full news...

  • June 7, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Sexual violence against children common in Afghanistan: report
    The Canadian Press: The trafficking and sexual exploitation of children in Afghanistan is a growing concern, Canada's Foreign Affairs Department was told in a confidential human-rights report prepared by senior officials. The illegal marriage of underage girls and the sexual abuse of young boys is commonplace, warned the Afghanistan Human Rights Report obtained by The Canadian Press under access-to-information laws. "Sexual violence is commonly reported but remains difficult to verify," said the partially censored review, written last summer.      Full news...

  • June 5, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    AFGHANISTAN: Radio station director’s murder still unpunished two years later
    Reporters Without Borders: Radio journalist Zakia Zaki’s murder two years ago tomorrow is still unpunished and her husband assures Reporters Without Borders that the lack of progress with the investigation is almost certainly due to the influence of the murder’s masterminds. The director of Sada-e-Solh (Peace Radio), Zaki was gunned down in her home in Jabalussaraj, in the northern province of Parwan, on 6 June 2007.      Full news...

  • May 30, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Amnesty International 2009 Human Rights Report on Afghanistan
    Amnesty International: Millions of people living in southern and eastern Afghanistan, terrorized by the Taliban, other insurgent groups and local militias ostensibly allied with the government, suffered insecurity that further restricted their already limited access to food, health care, and schooling. Indiscriminate attacks, abductions and the targeting of civilians reached unprecedented levels. The Taliban and other anti-government groups significantly expanded their attacks to cover more than a third of the country, including areas once considered relatively safe in the centre and the north.      Full news...

  • May 23, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Afghan women are killed for demanding their rights
    MADRE: Women in Afghanistan are routinely denied basic human rights, including education, healthcare, freedom from violence, and freedom of movement. Afghan women who fight to change this reality are attacked and even assassinated by ultra-conservatives. Meanwhile, US airstrikes that kill civilians further endanger Afghan women and their families. They also increase the power of the Taliban and other reactionary forces as more Afghans turn to them for protection from the United States.      Full news...

  • May 21, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Teenage mother stabbed to death in Faryab, Northern Afghanistan
    PAN: A teenage mother was stabbed to death by her in-laws in northwestern Faryab province on Wednesday what appears to be a result of domestic violence, officials said Thursday. Raheela, 18, who died from multiple stab wounds was the mother of one who got married four years ago, women affairs director in Faryab, Sharifa Azimi told PAN. Raheela's family members charged her father-in-law for killing her.      Full news...

  • May 20, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Closures after Taliban Threats: German Army Can’t Protect Afghan Girls’ Schools
    Six schools in the northern region of Kunduz closed following Taliban threats in recent weeks. The German army says it can't protect them. The schools received letters threatening acid and gas attacks, and teachers and pupils responded by staying home. The Afghan authorities finally decided to shut the schools altogether. The affected district of Chahar Darreh in the province of Kunduz is largely under the Taliban's control.      Full news...

  • May 13, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Why We Fight: U.S. troops die for rapists
    Boise Weekly: American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don't have that problem. They know exactly what they're fighting for: rapists. America's media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women.      Full news...

  • May 12, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    97 girl students, teachers poisoned in Afghanistan
    Xinhua: Nearly 100 girl students and teachers of a school in Kapisa province, 80 km north of the Afghan capital Kabul, mysteriously fell unconscious on Tuesday, spokesman of Public Health Ministry Ahmad Farid Rahed said. "A possible poisonous gas attack in Qazak Girl School this morning in Kohistan district has sickened 90 students and seven teachers," Rahed told Xinhua.      Full news...

  • May 6, 2009 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
    Civilians pay price of war from above
    The Independent: Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as "human shields" by the Taliban and we shall say that we "deeply regret" innocent lives that were lost. But we shall say that it's all the fault of the terrorists, not our heroic pilots and the US Marine special forces who were target spotting around Bala Baluk and Ganjabad.      Full news...



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Gulbar in a local hospital in Badghis province
Gulbar, an Afghan woman who was burnt by her husband in Nov.2005 (details...)

Muska a victim in so-called liberated Afghanistan
Muska, a female election worker who committed suicide after rape attempt on her in Jalalabad on Oct.9, 2004 (details...)
A woman victim of family violence
A true face of Afghan women today.
"There is a huge gap between the reality on the ground and the 'remarkable progress' claimed by western diplomats who sit in fortified compounds behind guards..." (Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, November 5, 2006)

Women crying
Women wailing with grief as they are turned away from a funeral in Kabul in late 1994. AI
Those responsible for these killings are now in possession of power in Afghanistan and strongly supported by the US government.

An Afghan women
A woman with her child recounts how her husband was killed in Afshar, west of Kabul. Hundreds of innocent people from Hazara minority were massacred by forces of Sayyaf and Ahmad Shah Massoud in this area in 1993
Zarmeena is being excuted by Taliban
Public execution of an Afghan woman by Taliban in Kabul
Photos from a video film by RAWA (click here to view more photos and movie clips)

a victim
A victim of the fundamentalists brutalities against women
More photos


A woman who was gang-raped and then killed The Jehadi fundamentalists after gang-raping Shukria, killed her in cold-blood

Shukria d/o Ali Mardan was the mother of four children and lived in Kabul. She had a tailoring-shop. On May 22, 1993 she was on her way to Shahrara when suddenly a car braked to a halt and a group of armed-jehadi jumped out and dragged her to their car and in a minute disappeared. Her ill-fated family searched every where but in vain.... Till, after fifty-five days her blood-soaked semi-naked body was found in Khairkhana, Kabul.

Today again the Northern Alliance, the rapists and murderers of thousands of Shukrias have key positions in the new Afghan government.


Nahid killed on Feb.9, 1993 Naheed another victims of the Jehadi Fundamentalists

Thirteen-year-old Nahida Hassan became a symbol for Afghan women and girls who were raped during the two decades of war. [On Feb.9, 1993] when a commander and twenty of his troops broke into her Kabul apartment, killing her 12-year-old brother and gunning down her other male relatives, Nahida understood she was the target. To avoid being sexually savaged, she leapt from the sixth-floor window to her death. Today, there is a shrine on the spot where she fell. "Everyone knew who the commander was. But no one dared touch him," said the girl's 64-year-old grandfather, Mohammed Hassan. The commander enjoyed the protection of his party, whose fundamentalist cleric leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, headed the government at the time and, more recently, the Northern Alliance, which holds key positions in the new interim administration.

Jan Goodwin, The Nation, April 29, 2002


WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN: A human rights catastrophe
(Amnesty International document, March 1995)


Self-immolation among Afghan Women (horrible photos)


Afghan woman, victim of terrible family violence     Victim of crime by husband     Domestic Violence against children    Self-immolations among Afghan women    Gang-rape of 12-y-old girl





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