Source: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
In 20 years of American-backed governments Afghanistan has changed immensely – singers, activists, and journalists showed the country that beyond the bloodshed, a world of culture, music, and beauty existed. Many of them were raised outside the country and returned to the homeland left by their parents in the previous wars. They helped rebuilding the nation, and now they are “back in exile,” joined by many other Afghans who managed to escape after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in mid-August.
Afghans exiles have been developing various discourses, including recording the memories of their flight, expressing nostalgia of a yearned-for past, and calling for social-political mobilization for the motherland.
When Afghanistan’s first midwife-led birth centre opened in the impoverished district of Dasht-e-Barchi in western Kabul this year it was a symbol of hope and defiance.
It began receiving expectant mothers in June, just over a year after a devastating attack by gunmen on the maternity wing at the local hospital left 24 people dead, including 16 mothers, a midwife and two young children.
They promised it would be different. As the Taliban gunmen surged into Kabul to seize power again, they said women had nothing to fear.
Few believed them then and, as each day passes, there are fewer still as people living in the capital say life is deteriorating under growing Taliban oppression and violence.
Thousands of people have been forced from their homes and land by Taliban officials in the north and south of Afghanistan, in what amounted to collective punishment, illegal under international law, Human Rights Watch has warned.
Many of the evictions targeted members of the Shia Hazara community, while others were of people connected to the former Afghan government. Land and homes seized this way have often been redistributed to Taliban supporters, HRW said.
Shayasta Wardak, a graduate of Kabul University’s sharia law faculty, spent years working as a judge in a Kabul district court, adjudicating disputes over marital splits, property and child custody.
But after the Taliban took over the Afghan capital in August, Wardak and her female colleagues were told their services were not required. When the women — who had tried to return to work in a group a few days after the takeover — demanded to know why, the young Taliban blocking their entry to the courthouse scoffed.
44% of Afghan refugees housed temporarily at eight US military bases are children, according to a letter from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
34% of the refugee population at the bases are adult men, and 22% are adult women, the letter which is dated October 8 states.
Afghan teenager Amena saw dozens of classmates killed when her girls’ school was targeted by an Islamic State bomb attack in May, but she was determined to continue her education.
Now, like most secondary school girls in the country, she is banned from lessons altogether after the Taliban’s hardline government excluded them from returning to class one month ago.
Afghanistan’s junior female football team and their immediate families are to relocate to Britain from Pakistan after recently escaping their homeland, the government has said.
The cars, minibuses and armoured vehicles that the CIA used to run its shadow war in Afghanistan had been lined up and incinerated beyond identification before the Americans left. Below their ashy grey remains, pools of molten metal had solidified into permanent shiny puddles as the blaze cooled.
The faux Afghan village where they trained paramilitary forces linked to some of the worst human rights abuses of the war had been brought down on itself. Only a high concrete wall still loomed over the crumpled piles of mud and beams, once used to practise for the widely hated night raids on civilian homes.
Over the past few months, as we’ve watched our country collapse again and taken over by the Taliban, I, and many other Afghans have been experiencing trauma.
We’ve felt under attack from all sides. From the false narrative that Afghans didn’t fight for their country, or the narrative that the Taliban have changed; above all, we’ve been witnessing the desperation of fellow Afghans as everything they have built over the past 20 years has come under threat.
