The situation of women throughout Afghanistan, after the Taliban took full control, is back in the dark ages, and as women, we are on this side of the globe, unable to share feelings.

"I am afraid of the Afghan sisters. Afghan women will go through what I've been through again, thinking they're going to be desperate not to be allowed into classrooms and reading books. - Malala

"They (the Taliban) are always looking for opportunities to flog, hurt, demean you, and enjoy it, even if they don't know why." - Shukriya Barakzai, an Afghan woman

On August 15, 2021, after the Afghan president fled and government forces did not advance, the capital Kabul on Sunday bloodless opened the city, the Taliban Taliban regime fully regained control of Afghanistan. Twenty years on, America's investment in Afghanistan's hard-earned gains were all but wiped out before 9/11.

16 U.S. military accelerated withdrawal, Kabul International Airport appeared unprecedented despair - hundreds of people, some climbing in the gliding aircraft boarding gate, or chasing aircraft on the take-off runway, some people shouted "if we can not leave, you do not want to go", the U.S. military once fired shots into the air, before finally emptying the take-off runway.

Beyond the camera, Afghan women are even more fearful.

"For the world, it's just a city crash. But it's much more than that for me. You know, a collapsed city means thousands of souls fall, millions of dreams fall, our history, our culture, our art, our lives, all the beautiful ones that collapse. - R, a 33-year-old woman living in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

(Same show:"Afghanistan's Daughters Crying": Teaching Women, She Can't Even Kill)

Under the Taliban, the dark ages of Afghan women

The Taliban came to power from 1996 to 2001, a dark age for Afghan women, women over the age of 10 who were not authorized to teach, women were completely masked, unable to work, unnecessarily unable to leave their homes, and were accompanied by male family members if they needed to go out, and international human rights organizations have repeatedly listed Afghanistan as "one of the most difficult places for women to live in the world".

Twenty years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, injustice has also led to a dramatic increase in the situation of women in major cities: women can be taught, employed, given almost equal rights to men, and even represent public opinion in politics. In 2012, the proportion of women in the Afghan Parliament reached 27.6 per cent. Zarifa Ghafari, then 24, was elected Afghanistan's first female mayor in 2018.

"Before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, we had nothing . . . everything was recreated over the last two decades, and women were almost certain to regain everything." Manizha Naderi, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women, the world's largest Afghan feminist NGO

However, after taking office, the mayor of Ghafari has been assassinated by the Taliban three times, and his father was shot dead last year.

The Taliban pledged on August 15th to protect the lives of women and opposition figures, and is expected to pardon former Afghan government workers. But in July, the Taliban reportedly took control of parts of Afghanistan, where executions began, banning women from working, replacing them with male relatives, enforcing the law, closing girls' schools and allowing women to wear burqa masks to get out of the house, like a remake of "The Story of the Woman."

(Extended reading: Afghan femininity special: Women should not be victims wherever the world is)

A hundred years ago, Afghanistan was the world's most gender-progressive country

For Afghan women, history is not a linear advance, but a repeat of the gyrations of tragedy. Before the Taliban, Afghan women were highly Westernized, able to dress freely and have equal access to higher education, even as early as a hundred years ago.

In 1919, Afghanistan's "Anti-British War" was successful and officially sovereign, when the country's leaders banned the sale of brides, child marriage, polygamy, and nagy, encouraged women to be taught and abolished gender segregation. Despite the attacks by reactionary forces, the successors slowed down and cautiously and steadily advanced the peace process. In 1964, The Constitution of Afghanistan guaranteed women's rights, including more comprehensive participation in power, not only by voting, but also by standing for election, and that there were no shortage of women in the medical, scientific, educational and political quality sectors.

In 1978, the Communist Party took control of Afghanistan, but also under socialist ideology, women's rights benefited from the scope, from the original metropolitan areas, to the general public. However, after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, women had little value other than providing family and childbirth, and were in a direct descent into the darkest of times by banning education, work and access to public places alone.

After 2001, the United States fostered an elected government in Afghanistan and made progress in the development of women's rights, but it was still far from enough. More than half of Afghanistan's population is located in villages outside urban areas, where women are still mostly uneducated and living a masked life in Buka. Twenty years of development is still too slow, social trust can not accumulate, from the president to military leaders, personal interests as the sole priority, military morale is low, front-line soldiers have been interviewed, the battlefield came back from death, food only potatoes.

Low social trust, urban-rural disparities, government and military corruption provide fertile ground for the Taliban's resurgence, and the withdrawal of the United States is a necessary opportunity for the Taliban to seize the opportunity to surround the city from the countryside, only to thicken the siege of the capital, that is, let the president flee, bloodless city. China's foreign minister, who met with the Taliban's substantive leaders last month, has indirectly acknowledged the Taliban's diplomatic representation.

The current situation in Afghanistan is heartbreaking, and we are heartbroken to see how quickly a country can collapse in its long efforts to advance gender equality. We do not want to end this story with fear, and in our hearts we believe there is room for international community outstretched/solidarity.

In an interview with the New York Times in April, Fatima Gailani, a senior Afghan government official in charge of peace talks with the Taliban, said she had chosen to believe that "Afghan women are more powerful than they used to be" and that the international community needed to find a way to do something between fear and despair.

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