Women Protesters Claim Taliban Damaged Their Educational Documents, Detained Journalists

The two senior foreign policy officials of Russia and Turkmenistan met in Moscow on Friday.

Both countries have close relations with the Taliban and have accepted diplomats of the group. However, they believe that the Taliban does not have the ability to fight against terrorist groups.

In the statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia stated that during the consultations between Syromolotov and Hajiyev, special attention was paid to cooperation in countering terrorism, extremism, and terrorist threats emanating from Afghan soil.

Both officials have emphasised on the continuation of joint efforts to curb terrorists, terrorists' financial resources, and drug trafficking.

The Russian and Turkmen officials have also discussed the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation to support stability in Central Asia.

It has been reported that, among others, the Afghan women held these protests in front of Al Fath school in Macroriyan area and Maleka Sorraya school in the Taimani area of Kabul city.

In Afghanistan, with the return of the Taliban, it has been more than a year since secondary and high schools have been closed to Afghan girls. Taliban have also deprived women of work and political participation.

After the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, they immediately began rolling back the rights of women and girls. Women began to protest on the streets since Taliban’s first week in power, despite the grave risks they faced in doing so. Women and girls have protested the Taliban’s restrictive policies and have demanded the right to education, work, and justice.

These protests have always been met with violence. The Taliban response was brutal from the beginning, beating protesters, disrupting protests, and detaining and torturing journalists covering the demonstrations.

Dozens of women have been arrested and tortured for holding peaceful protests demanding their rights, amid mounting restrictions that have stripped away their freedoms.

Earlier too, women from all communities came together in Kabul and protested, chanting slogans against the Taliban regime, however, the Taliban violently supressed them. Then, female university students in provinces of Herat and Bamiyan followed suit and held protests, where they were similarly beaten up and dispersed. Next, women in Balkh province took to the street to protest the regime.

The report stated that Taliban are intensifying these assaults in response to women’s rights campaigns in Afghanistan and Iran, and amid their own struggle to consolidate power. The report added that the Taliban’s intensifying violations against women risk mass atrocities and may presage greater violent extremism and threats to international security.

It stated that governments that engage with the Taliban or shelter Afghan refugees should appoint special envoys for Afghan human and women’s rights to press the case for reform in diplomatic engagements with the Taliban.

The report referred to U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett’s report of his 12-day visit to Afghanistan and said that he deserves more resources and a more robust mandate to investigate the myriad abuses of women’s rights that are being reported and, if warranted, refer crimes to the International Criminal Court.

In the report, it has been stated that the Taliban previously forced their restrictions on women through their official “morality police.” But now, Taliban leaders’ more strident directives to control women have emboldened, or compelled, countless other men into abusive roles as “enforcers.” Taliban have forced shopkeepers, teachers and other ordinary citizens into enforcement roles.

“Increasingly, Afghan women said, abuses are committed by gunmen dressed in ordinary street clothes, whom women could not identify. These armed squads entered women’s classrooms in universities and private schools across Kabul, demanding to inspect female students’ clothing,” the report said.

It also highlighted that in public elementary schools, the Taliban have been appointing women, trained in the regime’s approved madrassas, as teachers and principals. The Taliban order them to enforce the regime’s requirements for women and girls to wear all-concealing clothing.

The report also mentioned that on October 11, Taliban’s rule enforcers expelled about 60 female students, most from the ethnic Hazara minority, from dormitories of Kabul University. Female students who earned high school diplomas before the Taliban takeover, and who this month sat for university entrance examinations, report that Taliban officials prohibited them from registering for studies in fields including engineering, economics, veterinary science and journalism.

Soon after re-taking power last year, the Taliban scrapped the 20-year-old Women’s Affairs Ministry and re-established the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which the 1990s Taliban regime used to repress women’s rights and their roles in public life.

After the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the group has still not been recognised as a legitimate government.

Many countries have asked the Taliban to reopen girls' schools and to form an inclusive government, as the basis of their recognition.

However, Zabihullah Mujahid said in Turkey that for the Taliban “recognition by nations is more important than recognition by the governments."

Noori, in a post on his Facebook account, had written that “whoever is against our children’s education is our main enemy”.

Sources told Afghanistan International that despite efforts and repeated demands of journalists and his family, the Taliban haven’t released Noori.

In his Facebook post, Noori had pointed to the Friday prayer speech of an Imam and had written that “Mullah Saheb with courage and a loud voice said that girls’ education is haram [forbidden]”.

This journalist had emphasised that “no one had the zeal and courage to stand in front of the mosque and throw out the mullah”.

Sources told Afghanistan International that after this Facebook post, Taliban forces detained the journalist and according to this source he had been warned by the Taliban earlier as well.