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The determined messages and emails hold coming… ten yesterday, 18 as we speak, nonetheless extra tomorrow – voicemails like this one: ‘The place are you, Miss? We’re coming to kill you. Are you frightened?’
The supposed sufferer, a feminine journalist, performed it to me on Friday from Kabul. The Taliban are advancing on town and now they’ve her non-public quantity. Like 1000’s of educated ladies there, she is terrified.
Right now we’re witnessing a battle for the very soul of Afghanistan – between modernity, enlightenment, democracy and a medieval world of extremism and barbarity.
Girls had been compelled into the new, blue nylon burkas the Taliban demanded, barred from leaving their properties with out a male family member, banned from being handled by male medical doctors – though feminine medical doctors weren’t allowed to practise. (Pictured, Afghan widows anticipate meals to be distributed by CARE Worldwide in Kabul)
When six-year-old Nazdana from Kandahar was requested what she wished to be when she grew up, she stated a dentist.She is now in a camp in Kabul having fled the preventing
Girls aren’t required to put on full face masking underneath the Afghani authorities, as they had been underneath the Taliban, although many nonetheless do
The West knew this in 2001, after we first determined the Taliban should be stopped, and we all know it now.
But this time we’re strolling away within the full information of the catastrophe to return.
A number one feminine diplomat, Fawzia Koofi, is amongst these to be threatened. In 2020 she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her position as one among solely three ladies representing the Afghan authorities on the latest – now failed – peace talks with the Taliban in Doha. She is one among my dearest pals.
Marooned in Kabul together with her daughters, she is being hunted for the crime of being feminine.
She tells me: ‘I’m not frightened for myself however for my ladies,’ her voice breaking. ‘This isn’t nearly me. It’s about all the ladies of Afghanistan. Had been ladies’s rights only a bubble on the water?’
Throughout Britain, anybody who is aware of Afghanistan is receiving related determined calls and emails.
An Afghan choose hits a girl with a whip in entrance of a crowd in Ghor province, Afghanistan August 31, 2015
Internally displaced Afghan ladies, who fled from the northern province resulting from battle between Taliban and Afghan safety forces, collect to obtain free meals being distributed by Shiite males at Shahr-e-Naw Park in Kabul on August 13, 2021
It’s a far cry from the day I arrived in Kabul in December 2001, simply weeks after the Taliban had been compelled from energy by the Individuals following the September 11 assaults.
Then, a dusting of contemporary, white, powder snow lined the bottom, matching the white hijabs worn by the little ladies who now proudly carried their satchels to high school, which was allowed as soon as once more. I watched them delicately navigate filthy open sewers and the shells of burnt-out tanks in streets which, simply weeks earlier, had been the scene of brutal preventing.
The temper was euphoric. Each Afghan I spoke to was relieved the Taliban had been gone.
Throughout their six years of rule, that they had taken the nation again into the Darkish Ages.
Girls had been compelled into the new, blue nylon burkas the Taliban demanded, barred from leaving their properties with out a male family member, banned from being handled by male medical doctors – though feminine medical doctors weren’t allowed to practise.
Tv, music and images had been all banned.
Public executions changed sports activities on the soccer stadium.
However in these heady winter days of 2001, music started to blare from each cafe and taxi and Afghans gathered their households collectively for marriage ceremony celebrations.
However that, thoughts you, was in Kabul and a handful of city centres corresponding to Herat and Mazar. Elsewhere, particularly within the distant rural south, little modified. There, the retreating Taliban fighters loved widespread assist – and nonetheless do.
For the Taliban, Kabul is the corrupt hang-out of a metropolitan elite.
Afghanistan is as polarised as its broiling summers and freezing winters. Three-quarters of the nation is barely liveable mountain or desert. Fifty-nine languages are spoken. Some distant villages stay three or 4 days by donkey from the closest city. The Afghan authorities by no means reached them. They nonetheless have neither faculties nor well being clinics.
Southern Kandahar is the driest and most poverty stricken – and the standard Taliban stronghold.
I spent 5 years in Afghanistan, working to advertise a rising Afghan media. I skilled political reporters in how one can ask robust questions of their new authorities. No small factor for the trainee who’d been crushed on the soles of his ft with wire cable by his bosses on Taliban state radio for the ‘crime’ of constructing a mistake on air. I arrange neighborhood radio stations in distant provinces and edited the primary ever radio programme for Afghan youngsters, for which I recruited 12 younger female and male presenters of various ethnic teams.
Manisha was one among them. Carrying denims, together with her hair in a stylish bob, she spoke three languages realized from a mom who’d run an underground faculty for her ladies from the household basement.
Manisha embodied the face of a newly liberated Afghanistan. We actively recruited ladies like her, believed in them and bought them the dream of a vivid future. And now? To my disgrace and horror, Manisha is being personally focused by the Taliban.
The folks we now have left behind at the moment are in very actual hazard.
Diplomat Fawzia warns: ‘I worry the Afghan folks now face a alternative between the Taliban or a civil conflict.
‘I used to be a polytechnic scholar when the Taliban took management of Kabul in 1996. I watched as they burned books then set hearth to the constructing.
‘Right now my daughter is a political science scholar at Kabul college. I can’t comprehend that is about to occur once more. All the pieces we now have labored and fought for in 20 years is crashing down.’
The plight of girls and ladies is summed up in a broadly circulating portrait of six-year-old Nazdana from Kandahar, now overrun by the Taliban.
Requested what she wished to be when she grew up, she had stated a dentist. She is now in a camp in Kabul, all such plans in ruins.
Retired Main Normal Charlie Herbert, a former commander of British forces in Helmand and a Nato adviser, is one among 45 senior army officers calling for extra visas to be issued to these Afghans who served the Crown.
He’s in direct contact with former interpreters and different workers, such because the light, form man who tended the roses within the Nato backyard.
The British Authorities just isn’t providing visas to subcontractors, to back-room workers or these dismissed for minor causes, however the Taliban aren’t making such distinctions. If caught, they are going to be killed.
And make no mistake, the wives and kids of the military, police and support employees, and anybody with connections to the United Nations or the federal government, are already being arrested and murdered.
In the meantime, regardless of the dangers to herself, Fawzia has been visiting the numerous 1000’s of internally displaced individuals who have fled different cities and now at the moment are sleeping within the open-air picnic areas of Kabul’s leafy decorative parks. She says: ‘A few of the ladies delivered infants whereas they had been travelling, so that they had little infants who had been sick, that they had no consuming water, no washing services. All the youngsters had been in class. They’ve misplaced their futures. We have to instantly arrange short-term faculties and supply easy issues corresponding to sanitary pads and drugs.’
Internally displaced Afghan households, who fled from the northern province resulting from battle between Taliban and Afghan safety forces
We can not permit Kabul to fall and should ship extra troops earlier than it’s too late. The technology we’ve supported for 20 years can’t be deserted.
We should urgently step up humanitarian efforts to assist these fleeing, particularly ladies and kids.
Fawzia, who cites Margaret Thatcher as her heroine, has already survived an assassination try. She has a message for the British: ‘To the extraordinary readers, I do know you will have good intentions and have paid taxes that went to the folks of Afghanistan. I hope you’ll proceed to lift your voices in assist of us and particularly the ladies.
‘We had been on the forefront of defending democracy towards army extremism and the values of humanity, equality and dignity. The identical values the British represented for years.’
Hope is fading in Kabul as shortly as town’s electrical energy provide.
Fawzia calls me much less typically to save lots of her cell battery, however she has instructed me that if the Taliban assault her home, she’s going to attempt to name me and I’m to document the assault and to broadcast it to the world.
I’m praying it’s a name that I don’t obtain.
●Nadene Ghouri is co-author of The Favoured Daughter, One Lady’s Struggle To Lead Afghanistan Into The Future, by Fawzia Koofi.
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