Ariana: The second one-day international cricket match between Afghanistan and Ireland was called off on Saturday because of heavy and persistent rain in Sharjah. The third match is at the same ground on Tuesday. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Sports News
By Lina Rozbih
VOA News
March 8, 2024
WASHINGTON — For 27-year-old Leeda, “life is like hell” as her husband beats her every day and she “has to tolerate it” because she has “no other option.”
“My body is always bruised, now I am used to it, I have to tolerate it for my children,” Leeda, a mother of three who lives in the western city of Herat, told VOA with tears in her eyes.
But Leeda, who did not want her real name to be revealed for fear of reprisals, said that she has “nowhere to go” as her parents and siblings are not in Afghanistan and there is no organization in Herat she can turn to for help.
“In the past in Herat, women-operated offices used to help women like me, but those offices no longer exist,” Leeda said, adding that “if I go to the Taliban for help, they will imprison me. They listen to men, not women. What will I do with my children if I go to jail?”
A United Nations report released in December said the Taliban are sending to prison women who complain to them about gender-based violence and do not have male relatives to stay with.
“The confinement of women in prison facilities, outside the enforcement of criminal law, and for the purpose of ensuring their protection from gender-based-violence, would amount to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty,” stated the U.N. report.
The report added that the imprisonment of vulnerable women would have “a negative impact on their mental and physical health.”
The report, covering the period from August 2021 to March 2023, said that gender-based violence against women in Afghanistan includes murder, honor killings, sexual assault, injury and disability, and deprivation of women from receiving inheritances.
The Taliban told the U.N. that the handling of the cases of violence against women is “based on Sharia law and there is no injustice committed against women.”
After seizing power in 2021, the Taliban closed all the women’s protection centers in Afghanistan where female survivors of family violence would take refuge.
Even before the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan had one of the highest rates of violence against women, with nine in 10 women experiencing some sort of intimate-partner violence in their lifetimes.
Though the support system was not without shortcomings, female survivors of gender-based violence had access to “pro bono legal representation, medical treatment and psychological support,” Amnesty International stated in a 2021 report.
“The system was imperfect, but activists had fought hard for it, and it was gradually improving. One of the first things the Taliban did after seizing power was to destroy this system completely,” said Heather Barr, associate director at Human Rights Watch.
Barr said that the Taliban’s return brought about “the worst women’s rights crisis” in the world.
Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan are banned from secondary and university education, working with government and nongovernment organizations, and traveling long distances without a male relative. They are also barred from going to gyms and public parks.
Samira Hamidi, a regional campaigner for Amnesty International, told VOA that dismantling the institutions, such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, created “a huge gap” in the ability to monitor the women’s rights situation in Afghanistan, especially that of survivors of domestic violence.
“The Taliban’s measure to accommodate women survivors of domestic violence in prisons instead of safe houses and accommodations is a blatant violation of human rights, especially the right to freedom of movement and life,” said Hamidi.
She added that the Taliban “have no intention to protect women” who face gender-based violence.
With the Taliban’s continued crackdown on women’s rights in Afghanistan, female victims of gender-based violence, like Leeda, live in fear.
“I fear the Taliban,” Leeda said. “If I complain against my husband to anyone, my husband will send the Taliban after me.”
Roshan Noorzai of VOA’s Afghan Service contributed to this report, which originated in VOA’s Afghan Service.
By Ayaz Gul
VOA News
March 8, 2024
ISLAMABAD — The United Nations warned Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities Friday that their bans on women’s education and work risk pushing the country further into deeper poverty and international isolation.
The head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, called again on the fundamentalist regime to reverse the restrictions as the world marked International Women’s Day to highlight the need to invest in women.
“It is heartbreaking that we are seeing precisely the opposite unfolding in Afghanistan: a catastrophic and deliberate disinvestment that is causing immense harm to women and girls, creating only barriers to sustainable peace and prosperity,” said Roza Otunbayeva.
Since reclaiming power in August 2021, the Taliban have blocked girls from accessing secondary school education and beyond. They have limited women’s freedom of movement outside the home and prohibited most from public and private sector workplaces, including the United Nations and other aid groups.
The U.N. Development Program, or UNDP, reported Thursday that nearly 70% of Afghans do not have enough basic resources, and restrictions on women continue to thwart basic rights and economic progress. It said the Afghan economy had contracted by 27%, and unemployment doubled since the Taliban takoever.
“The biggest challenge is the continued edict that bans girls’ education. Not being able to move forward after the sixth grade is a major stumbling block,” said Kanni Wignaraja, UNDP’s director for Asia and the Pacific, told reporters in New York.
“Last year, no girl graduated the twelfth grade so how are they going to jump from sixth grade to moving into technical colleges or universities need for the medical field?” said Wignaraja, who recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan.
The ban on female aid workers has undermined relief activities in a country where the U.N. estimates more than 12 million women will need humanitarian assistance this year.
In a statement Friday, UNAMA said it “also fears a recent crackdown by the de facto authorities because of alleged non-compliance with the Islamic dress code is pushing women into even greater isolation due to fear of arbitrary arrest.”
The U.N. refers to the Taliban as de facto authorities because no foreign government has formally recognized their government in Kabul.
However, the euphemism has upset human rights groups and many women in Afghanistan, who are vehemently opposed to granting legitimacy to the Taliban government until it lifts all bans on women.
Heather Barr, the associate director at Human Rights Watch, urged diplomats, the UN, and aid workers on Friday to stop referring to the Taliban as the de facto authorities to show solidarity with Afghan women.
“This euphemism kowtows to Taliban demands for normalization,” Barr said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Rights groups oppose any recognition of the Taliban and accuse it of implementing “gender apartheid” policies.
“Every step toward normalizing the Taliban—every time they walk a red carpet, or send a new ambassador, or host a meeting w/smiling foreigners—sends a message to the Taliban that what they’re doing to women & girls is fine and they are free to carry on,” she wrote in a subsequent X post.
The U.N. acknowledged in a quarterly report Wednesday that the Taliban had consolidated political, security, and economic gains since taking power. However, it noted that Afghan de facto authorities “appear to be facing growing internal disagreements over key governance issues, including the enforcement of the drug ban.”
The report did not elaborate further, but Otunbayeva suggested after briefing a U.N. Security Council meeting on Wednesday that curbs on Afghan women were among the issues causing internal Taliban disagreements.
“There is a part of the [Taliban] government who understand that they should overcome [these restrictions]. But someone else … decided that no, women and girls should be behind the scene,” she said, without naming anyone.
Most of the religious edicts or decrees the reclusive Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has issued over the past 2½ years have targeted women directly, banning their rights to education, work, to visit public places, including parks and gyms, as well as preventing them from taking road trips without a male chaperone.
Akhundzada, who directs the government from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, defends his policies and dismisses international calls to reverse them as interference in Afghanistan’s internal matters.
Related
News Line Magazine: Tova Moradi, who was forced to flee Kabul, recalls her religious roots, a girlhood interrupted and the love she still carries – Around sundown on Aug. 31, 2021, a minivan stopped in front of Tova Moradi’s house in Kabul, Afghanistan. She had to get in as quickly and quietly as possible. Any attention could be dangerous. The Taliban had just taken control of Kabul two weeks prior. Their fighters were going door to door, hunting suspected opponents. Despite her frailty, the 83-year-old Moradi was a prized target because she was Jewish and had misled the Taliban during its previous rule in the 1990s by sheltering a rabbi in her house. She needed to escape, and Israelis were helping her flee. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: Afghanistan’s Noor Ali Zadran bid adieu to international cricket on Thursday after two Test matches, 51 ODIs and 23 T20Is. Zadran, who starred with a 28-ball 45 in Afghanistan’s first-ever ODI against Scotland at the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifiers in 2009, played his final game last week at the Tolerance Oval in the Test match against Ireland. The 35-year-old opener retires with 1216 runs in ODIs including a hundred and seven fifties. He made his T20I debut in 2010 and last played a T20I in 2023. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Afghan Cricket News
Fahim
Tolo News: Today, the 18th day of Hout (March 8), is the 10th anniversary of the passing of Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim. The former president Hamid Karzai and the former Chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation, Abdullah Abdullah, called Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim an “unforgettable personality” of the country. Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the former first deputy of the president, died at the age of 56 due to a heart attack on March 8, 2014. Click here to read more (external link).
8am: Local sources in Panjshir province report that the Taliban plan to establish migrant settlements on private lands in the Anaba district. These lands, currently serving as pasturelands in the village of Anaba, are nestled amidst residents’ houses and rugged mountains. However, some Panjshir residents and civil society activists criticize the Taliban, accusing them of echoing the historical actions of Emir Abdul Rahman Khan and Amanullah Khan, which disrupted local demographics. They stress that any attempt to seize land and relocate non-native individuals will only escalate tensions in the province. Click here to read more (external link).
Akmal Dawi
VOA News
March 7, 2024
Breshna Musazai endured 19 agonizing months in Qatar, anxiously awaiting resettlement to the United States as a refugee.
Forced to flee Afghanistan just two days after the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, Musazai found herself separated from her parents and her dreams shattered.
A dull ache in her right leg was a physical echo of the trauma she had endured.
A polio paraplegic in the left leg, Musazai took three bullets in her right leg from suspected Taliban assailants in 2016.
“I was praying at a mosque inside the university’s campus when the shooting started,” Musazai said, recalling the attack on the American University of Afghanistan, or AUAF.
Thirteen people, including seven students and a teacher, were killed, and 50 were injured in the complex attack that went on for hours.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, although the Afghan government blamed the Taliban.
A year after the attack, after doctors at First Baptist Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, performed surgery on her bullet wounds, Musazai was able to return to AUAF.
Following her graduation in 2018, Musazai embarked on a career focused on volunteering and advocating for women’s rights.
“Out of my four sisters,” Musazai told VOA from her home in Virginia, “I’m the only one who has been to university.”
Her parents, although they never went to college, supported her difficult pursuit of education.
“I wanted to be a doctor, but the AUAF did not have a medical school, so I decided to study law,” she said.
Opportunities in the US
Upon arriving in the United States, Musazai sought out paralegal and English legal language classes to continue her education.
“There are a lot of opportunities here,” she said, explaining her plans to pursue a master’s degree in law before working as a lawyer.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has admitted more than 80,000 Afghans.
As special emigrants and refugees, they are entitled to live and work across the United States. Many receive essential support, including medical care, food and other forms of assistance, to aid in their resettlement.
“Most of my classmates have left Afghanistan, but I heard some of them have got married,” she told VOA.
Musazai did not want to leave her home country but feared for her life under Taliban rule.
Despite the grim situation in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, particularly for women, Musazai holds onto the hope that Afghan girls will regain access to secondary education.
“Every other Muslim country lets girls go to school. So, why does Afghanistan deny its girls this basic right?” she asked.
As Afghanistan’s schools reopen for a third year under Taliban rule, there is no sign the regime will lift its ban on secondary and university education for girls.
International human rights organizations condemn the Taliban’s policy of excluding girls from secondary education, calling it gender apartheid.
“I hope [the Taliban] understand that girls’ education is good for Afghanistan and even good for them,” she said. “It makes no sense, and it serves no one’s interest to shut schools for anyone.”
Other Afghan Women News