8am: The Taliban government has recently dismissed all public health directors in 34 provinces. The Ministry of Public Health has also nominated new directors affiliated with the Taliban to replace public health directors in the provinces. Meanwhile, some former public health managers told Hasht-e Subh that most of the public health chiefs appointed by the Taliban were unprofessional. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Health News
Roshan Noorzai
VOA News
December 31, 2021
WASHINGTON — Afghan women who served in the country’s military are speaking out about how their life has changed under the Taliban.
“I feel like I am in prison,” said Jamila, 28, a former Afghan military officer in the western city of Herat. “I have to be at home. I can’t work or go out. I am so afraid.”
More than 6,300 women served in the former Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). Now they face not only threats to their life as former members of the military but also the Taliban’s imposed restrictions on their gender.
“We have no hope that things would change. I do not think that Afghan military women have any future under the Taliban,” said Jamila, who did not want her real name to be revealed for fear of reprisals.
The Taliban, who seized power after the Afghan government collapsed on August 15, have imposed repressive rules on women, including banning women from work, secondary education, and long-distance travel.
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations accused the Taliban in November of the summary killing of more than 100 former Afghan security officials despite the group’s promise of general amnesty.
Jamila served for 10 years in the 207th Zafar (Victory) Corps of the Afghan National Army, headquartered in Herat province. She says she now hears news every day of someone else who was killed or disappeared.
“I fear that they (the Taliban) might find me and kill me,” she said.
Despite assurances from senior Taliban leaders that the group plans no retribution killings, Jamila said their word cannot be trusted.
The more than 6,300 women who served as security forces were a small fraction of the country’s 300,000-strong force, but their careers represented a significant cultural shift for the conservative country.
Washington’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, reported in July that 4,253 women served in the police, 1,913 in the army and 146 in the air force.
Living in fear
Now, some of them are on the run.
“We have been moving from one place to another to avoid being identified,” Jamila said.
Serving in the Afghan military was always a significant risk for the women, whose families sometimes opposed their work.
“Despite the enormous obstacles,” said a SIGAR report in February 2021, Afghan women continued to join ANDSF “often at a great personal risk.”
Jamila, a mother of two, said that her family had opposed her joining the army. And, she said, they blame her for the hardships they now face.
“They are telling me that you joined the army and that is why our lives are in danger.”
Before the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, many women, government employees and social activists were killed in targeted attacks.
Of the seven Afghan women who were posthumously given the U.S. State Department’s 2021 International Women of Courage Award, three were working with Afghan security agencies.
A U.S. State Department press release issued in March 2021 stated that honorary awards were given “to seven leaders and activists from Afghanistan who were assassinated for their dedication to improving the lives of Afghans.”
Jamila said that after the Taliban takeover, some of her colleagues had escaped to Pakistan and Iran, but most of them remain in Afghanistan, living in fear.
“The majority could not flee because they do not have money (or) passport, or (are) having other problems,” Jamila added.
‘We fought them’
“I had no choice but to escape to Pakistan,” said a former Afghan army officer, 25, who did not want her identity to be disclosed for safety reasons.
The former officer, who was also posted in the Zafar Corps in Herat, said that she had to escape just after the fall of the city into the Taliban’s hands. “I went together with a family of my relatives and crossed to Pakistan.”
She said that most of the women who had served in the military in her province were in danger since “we fought them. They wanted to kill us, and we wanted to kill them.”
She does not see any future for her fellow female veterans in Afghanistan, she said. “Forget about the idea that they will let us go to work. They do not even let girls go to school. They do not accept women to be part of the society.”
The Taliban’s position on women’s rights had not changed from what she had heard about the group’s repressive rules in the 1990s, she added.
Under the Taliban, in the late ’90s, women were denied education and employment. The militant group also forced women to cover themselves from head to toe and prevented women from leaving their houses without a male companion.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghan women made some achievements. About 3.5 million girls were going to schools. About 30 percent of the civil servants and around 28 percent of parliamentarians were women.
Afghan women’s rights activists worldwide have been protesting the Taliban takeover, which has curbed the rights and freedoms that Afghan women achieved over the past 20 years.
On Tuesday, dozens of women took to the streets of Kabul, demanding work, food and education.
Call for help
“No one cares about us right now,” said the former army officer, adding that “NATO was supporting us. We were encouraged to join the army, but now we are forgotten.”
She called on the international community to help relocate those women whose lives are at risk under the Taliban.
Hosna Jalil, Afghanistan’s former deputy minister for women affairs who also served as deputy interior minister from December 2018 to January 2021, said that Afghan women who were working in the security sector are at great risk.
“Women (in the security sector), because their number was low and they can be identified easily, I think they are more vulnerable,” she said.
Initiatives are underway to relocate some of the former Afghan military women to a safer place, Jalil said, “but the process, to tell you honestly, is very scattered and slow.”
“And this is the reason that we lose them one by one,” Jalil said, referring to the targeted killings of former Afghan military personnel.
Some Afghan refugees living in Turkey are turning to the ancient practice of shepherding as a way to make a living. VOA’s Eyyup Demir has this report narrated by Sirwan Kajjo.
8am: The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported today that 45 journalists and media workers were killed in 2021 while on duty in 20 countries. The highest death toll was in Afghanistan, according to the (IFJ) report. Click here to read more (external link).
Kabulov
Tolo News: “I believe political recognition will be more like a symbolic act. As you see, the recognition is happening in practice. A delegation of the Taliban attended a summit within the Moscow structure here with us and they had the opportunity to talk face-to-face with the (envoys) of ten countries,” Kabulov told the Russian news outlet when asked whether Russia will recognize the “Taliban.” Click here to read more (external link).
Related
WSJ: Two decades ago, Iran helped the U.S. topple the Taliban regime to remove what it saw as a threat to its national security and fellow Shia Muslims in Afghanistan. Now, four months after the Taliban seized power in Kabul, Iran and Afghanistan are both struggling under crippling U.S. sanctions—a predicament that is pushing them to put longstanding ideological and political differences aside as they seek to fill the vacuum left behind by American troops. Click here to read more (external link).
AP: Arranging marriages for very young girls is common in the region. The groom’s family pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her parents until she is at least around 15. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons. Click here to read more (external link).
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Ghani
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
December 30, 2021
Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has again defended his sudden departure from Kabul in August, saying he had no choice but to leave the country as Taliban militants bore down on the capital after an agreement with the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump paved the way for their return.
Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Ghani said he fled Afghanistan on August 15 to avoid bloodshed and the destruction of Kabul as rival factions of militants bore down on the city, a claim not backed up by any evidence.
He also denied claims by another former Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, that a deal on a peaceful transfer of power was being hammered out and said the rumors that he left the country with millions of dollars in stolen funds were false.
“Two different factions of the Taliban were closing in from two different directions. And the possibility of a massive conflict between them that would destroy the city of 5 million and bring havoc to the people was enormous,” he said in the interview, broadcast on December 30.
“I did not know where we will go. Only when we took off, it became clear that we were leaving [Afghanistan]. So this really was sudden,” he added of his departure, which left a power vacuum filled within hours by the Taliban.
Ghani eventually flew to the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), where he received political asylum.
Ghani’s comments on his departure, which left Kabul rudderless as international armed forces made their final preparations to withdraw from the country after two decades, echoed a statement he made on September 8.
In the BBC interview, the former president said the downfall of the government was precipitated by the agreement Trump made with Taliban leaders.
“Instead of a peace process, we got a withdrawal process,” Ghani said, adding that the way the deal was done “erased us.”
A former World Bank employee and Kabul University dean, the 72-year-old Ghani became president after a deeply contentious election in 2014 that required Western mediation to settle.
His government participated in mostly stalled intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha with Taliban representatives that began in late 2020, although the Taliban kept up its campaign of violence throughout much of the process.
Western officials and analysts were stunned at the rapid Taliban advance capturing Afghan territory once the U.S.-led military withdrawal officially began in May.
After the withdrawal of international forces was declared complete on August 30, U.S. President Joe Biden said he had expected the Afghan government “to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown [but that] turned out not to be accurate.”
Ghani told the BBC that he shares part of the blame for the fall of Kabul for trusting “in our international partnership” and that in the end, what unfolded was “a violent coup, not a political agreement, or a political process where the people have been involved.”
Based on reporting by the BBC
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