Four years have passed since the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban’s religious fascists—four years in which the chains of imperialism, fastened around the back of our homeland for decades, have tightened even more around our bodies, souls, and minds. Today, the Taliban— as a dreadful creation of Pakistan’s intelligence services and the results of deals between the United States, Qatar, the Iranian regime, and reactionary forces in the region—have become a machine of death and repression. In the very first days of their rule, they deprived thousands of women of work and education; through guns and violence, they imposed a medieval inquisition; with their bloody policies, torture, and the disappearance of opponents, these executioners have turned the entire country into a terrifying prison. Wide spread unemployment, high prices for everyday life, bribery, corruption, hopelessness and dozens of other misfortunes have made life completely unbearable for our wretched people.
This imposed regime is the continuation of twenty years of the hollow rule of Karzai and Ghani, which injected the culture of treachery, fraud, and enslavement into the veins of society. The Taliban’s presence in Afghanistan is no coincidence—it is a link in the chain of the United States’ colonial strategy to control the region and to use fundamentalist and terrorist groups to achieve its sinister strategic and economic goals. Our grief-stricken land today is like a carcass over which the vultures of the region and the world fight. The United States still holds the reins of the Taliban, though it apparently has some disagreements with them. Pakistan, by nurturing its lackeys, stabs our people in the back; Iran dispatches its cultural and media spies, along with its religious militias; and Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia each, in their own way, support reactionary and fundamentalist forces, polluting our soil.
From the very first days, the Taliban seized the opportunity to take control of our national wealth and mineral resources, plundering them to enrich themselves. Forced displacements and the crushing of local protests have paved the way for looting, securing greater privileges, intensifying internal rivalries among Taliban, and our different ethnics—pushing Afghanistan toward deeper discord and greater crisis. Most Taliban leaders either personally control poppy cultivation and the narcotics trade or, by taking their share from smugglers and mafia groups, are in the process of becoming a new type of jihadi oligarch.
The Taliban’s bloody Emirate, contrary to its claims, is not dedicated to ensuring peace and human dignity but is bent on destroying the last vestiges of our people’s most basic rights. A number of former “republicans” have also turned into Taliban bootlickers and lobbyists. In Afghanistan, the CIA invested for decades in jihadists, members of the “Parcham” and “Khalq” factions, and any weak, unscrupulous individuals—turning them at every level, from intellectuals, journalists, and civil-society activists stripped of conscience and patriotism, to presidents, ministers, diplomats, and others—into loyal cadres. Separatist, ethnocentrist, and compromising intellectuals have always been openly or covertly hostile to democracy and secularism, sharing the table with traitors and fundamentalist criminals, with their umbilical cord ultimately tied to imperialism and Zionism.
If the revolutionary, patriotic, progressive, and nationalist forces do not recognize their heavy responsibility—if they do not tear away the mask of poisonous imperialist and fundamentalist “culture” and “mentality” that has been pulled over the people’s minds and eyes, and if they fail to learn lessons from the painful experiences of the past— Afghanistan will not emerge from current horrific catastrophe. And several generations will sink into it and be destroyed. Let us learn from the Palestinian mothers, youth, and children who, in their steadfast defense of and love for their homeland, spare no sacrifice or act of bravery. Their epic stories of resistance and endurance have moved the awakened consciences of the world to admiration and support.
Today—when, unfortunately, no powerful, mass-backed, national, independent, democratic, and anti-fundamentalist force is present on the scene—it is our duty, without any expectation from foreign governments, to raise our own awareness and that of the deprived masses by every possible means and method. We must ruthlessly reject the vile policy of “choosing between the bad and the worse,” which for years has been imposed on us by the arsenals of Western governments and reactionary forces, leaving our people passive and without a vision. Until the dawn of freedom, the movement—in every possible form, weight, place, and level—must remain alive and tangible; we must not allow the young generation to be turned into withered, frightened, and broken human beings.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has likewise emphasized that our honorable and patriotic women must cleanse their ranks of the wind-up puppets of reaction and imperialism, and must not allow hateful, self-serving figures such as Fawzia Koofi, Habiba Sarabi, Shukria Barakzai, Asila Wardak, Manizha Bakhtari, Sima Samar, Naheed Farid, Mahbouba Seraj, and the like to divert women’s struggle from the revolutionary path toward compromise and submission to the White House and the Western governments.
If the women of our country have been the first victims of religious fascism, over the past four years—enduring chains, imprisonment, and the sacrificing their blood upon the ground—they have also been at the forefront and the main pillar of the struggle. The leadership of the anti-Taliban fight has been recorded in history in their name. The Taliban’s fear of women’s uprising has an obvious reason, they know that our spirit of struggle and suppressed anger—like that of the courageous women of Iran and Turkey—can shake the very foundations of religious tyranny. For this reason, the Taliban, through the most brutal attacks and methods, strive to erase women entirely from the society. The arrest of girls under the pretext of “improper hijab,” their humiliation and insult by the whip-wielding agents of the “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue,” their systematic deprivation of education and work, and other forms of pressure and threats are all clear evidence of this terror—because the Taliban have realized that if this latent potential awakens and is organized, their inquisitorial domination will not last.
Bereaved sisters and mothers,
Let us today, with a loud voice and without hesitation, declare that the fundamentalists—whether in the form of jihadists, Taliban, or any other traitorous servants of imperialist masters—must be removed from the stage of Afghanistan. There can be no reform in this system; no salvation will come through compromise or supplication. The only path is to raise political awareness, to organize, and to strengthen the fighting forces so that the masses of all strata and nationalities of our people rise up united and with one voice in a nationwide uprising. Otherwise, we will never break free from these disgraceful chains and will stand condemned before the generations to come.
Only freedom, social justice, and democracy based on secularism can heal the wounds of our people. Therefore, let us sharpen the dagger of struggle against the religious fascism of the jihadists and Taliban and their imperialist backers!
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
August 14, 2025