Ending the rights that women had acquired in Afghanistan in the last 20 years is one of the main objectives of the Taliban dictatorship.
Under the precepts of the strictest interpretation of Islam and supported by ancestral tribal pillars, the fundamentalists justify the imposition of clothing that completely hides them, the prohibition of their traveling alone, as well as obstacles to education (forbidden to girls of high school), employment or sports.
In short, they want to relegate almost half of a population of 40 million people to a kind of permanent social dungeon.
EL PAÍS has interviewed five women, whose previous work is now buried in the trunk of memories to find out how they live under the yoke of the Islamic Emirate: a model, an activist, a police officer,
a journalist and a soccer player.
Faced with these testimonies, there is the vision offered by the spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
It is a kind of morality police that, in addition to crushing women's rights, controls the length of men's beards and orders them to go to the mosque to pray.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
there is the vision offered by the spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
It is a kind of morality police that, in addition to crushing women's rights, controls the length of men's beards and orders them to go to the mosque to pray.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
there is the vision offered by the spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
It is a kind of morality police that, in addition to crushing women's rights, controls the length of men's beards and orders them to go to the mosque to pray.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
It is a kind of morality police that, in addition to crushing women's rights, controls the length of men's beards and orders them to go to the mosque to pray.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
It is a kind of morality police that, in addition to crushing women's rights, controls the length of men's beards and orders them to go to the mosque to pray.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
The Ministry of Women "was created by the Westerners to impose their culture," says Akif Muhajer.
A well-known position, so what has happened in these 12 months has caught very few by surprise.
Even so, there are still attempts to resist the Taliban yoke: several dozen women tried to demonstrate this Saturday in Kabul to demand "bread, work and freedom".
They were dispersed with volleys of shots fired into the air by the Taliban.
Sonita Zewari, 30, is a feminist activist from Afghanistan.
Sonita Zewari, women's rights activist
Sonita Zewari, a 30-year-old business administration graduate and feminist activist, arrives for the interview after going to the gym.
She recognizes that this routine, thanks to the fact that there are schedules for men and women, is one of the few windows for recreation that she has left.
She surprises how, in the midst of a story plagued by calamities and despair, she is able to truffle from time to time a hook that unleashes her smile and that of the reporter.
"I hope to get married in Spain," she says after recounting that her life is limited to throwing away savings in a rented house with her mother and her three brothers, 22, 24 and 27 years old.
Only a handful of relatives know where she lives, since her role as a defender of women's rights put her on the target for taking to the streets to demonstrate.
The bearded men showed up at his home after a publication on his Facebook social network profile that they did not like.
So, like thousands of persecuted Afghans, he decided to change his address.
He believes, in any case, that the best thing would be to escape from the country and he keeps knocking on the door of different organizations to make it easier for him to leave Afghanistan.
If he can, he says, with the whole family;
if not, she alone: "[I don't see] any hope in the future."
She relates that some of her jobs from previous years, which she was combining with university, are currently unrecoverable.
She worked, among others, in the local airline company Kamair, in the NGOs Norwegian Committee for Refugees and Shelter For Life, in the state offices of the electronic DNI or in a BBC Radio educational project.
For Sonita Zewari,
Tamana (fictitious name), belonged to the Afghan national soccer team between 2007 and 2018. LUIS DE VEGA
Tamana, footballer for the Afghan national team
"The Taliban know almost everything about me," says Tamana concerned, with a stormy story behind it that includes a notorious case of sexual abuse.
The appointment with this 30-year-old footballer, who until 2019 played for a dozen years on the Afghan national football team, changes scenery several times.
It finally takes place by the light of a lantern in a basement of a house in the capital.
After doubting whether she would publish her real name, she decides to hide it with a false one despite the fact that this could be an obstacle to her possible departure from the country.
She attends covered in rigorous black from head to toe and accompanied by her husband and their eight-month-old daughter.
"I go like this to obey the Taliban rule, but it's not comfortable, I'm not used to it and it makes me hot," she says as she opens a folder with numerous documents from her years as an athlete.
diplomas,
photos, accreditations... She spreads it all out on the carpeted floor as an argument to show that she had a previous life in numerous countries and that soccer, unlike other of her colleagues, has not been her passport to avoid the rigor of the Islamic Emirate.
"This country has become a prison," she says as she recalls her time as a part-time fitness trainer at Parliament House, an institution now long forgotten.
"I was a very active girl, free as a bird, but now I can't fly like I did before as an athlete," she laments while explaining that, despite the obstacles she encountered at home, her three younger sisters have also dedicated themselves to sports .
A goalkeeper and coach, another referee and the last player.
Being a female soccer player in a society like the Afghan has never been easy.
However, to the reticence that Tamana had to face in previous years -with attacks on her father in her own neighborhood-, physical aggressions against her husband and her mother-in-law are now added.
"There are relatives of both families who pass our information to the Taliban," she says as she shows a photo taken through a window of the bearded men entering her home.
The scandal that surrounded the Football Federation in previous years did not help his career advance either.
He was caught in the middle of the gale of the conviction of the president, Keramuudin Karim, for sexual abuse to life ban.
She remembers it in tears, because she was one of the victims.
"Sometimes I wake up thinking that this Afghanistan is a dream, but I find that we don't even have enough to buy milk for the girl," he says.
She continues talking and, in a more than unusual gesture, begins to breastfeed her daughter.
“I am very happy to have her as a woman.”
says her husband, silent until now and pending the little girl.
On her part, Tamana, as a gesture of rebellion, decides to pose for her photo with one of her soccer jerseys.
This woman was a police officer until the arrival of the Taliban in 2021.LUIS DE VEGA
a police
Underhanded threats launched on social media scared a police officer at a passport office after the Taliban took Kabul last year.
Some 5,000 women from all over Afghanistan were then part of the body in different positions that, despite the difficulties they encountered, did not exclude street patrols.
Today there are only men.
The uniform of this 27-year-old woman, who prefers not to publish her name, was left at the box office.
She jokes thinking that the same thing ended up being put on by a Taliban.
Her life has hardly changed since she was interviewed by EL PAÍS a year ago, in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood, dominated mostly by the Shia Hazara ethnic group, to which she belongs.
Now, she looks almost nine months pregnant and is accompanied by her husband, Nasrullah, an anesthesiologist who agrees to the meeting being held in one of the offices of the hospital where he works.
Neither of them openly expresses their desire to flee Afghanistan, but they recognize that the change of address has been essential to achieve some peace of mind.
She, however, misses her presence in the world of work.
“What I want is to be able to work, whether I am married or not, whether I am a mother or not…”, she says.
“The problem is not being a police officer again [something that he considers lost], but if, for example, I can occupy a position in which I can serve others, such as a human rights NGO,” she yearns.
When she was a police officer she alternated her work with the Faculty of Law and Politics at Kateb University, a private center in the capital.
He has tried to resume those studies, but cannot due to economic problems.
In addition, the segregation between men and women imposed by the fundamentalists greatly complicates the schedules in the faculties for women.
"I tell her that I pay for her studies, but she insists that she wants to be financially independent," says Nasrullah.
“I would like her to have the opportunity to be a police officer again, if that is what she wants,” adds her husband.
Freshta Haidari, 21, worked as a model until the Taliban came to power in 2021.LUIS DE VEGA
Freshta Haidari, model
At age 16 he married;
at 17 she had her daughter and at 18 she became a model.
By then, Freshta Haidari's husband, now 21, had gone to Turkey and "abandoned" them, she says.
He assures that the death threat and that he intends to take the little girl away from him.
“I had to work to get the girl forward because I don't have siblings and my father, who married a second woman, didn't take care of me.
Neither does my husband's family, ”she lists as the one that is eliminating the usual chances of survival in a country where family pillars are essential.
Now, Dina, as she presented herself on her social profiles, lives with her daughter and her mother and she has no job or income.
The young woman combined the activity of the catwalk with her work in some media and as
a community manager
.
A career that she was forced to stop in her tracks when the Emirate overshadowed the world of fashion, parties, parades and events in which she participated.
Her face, with a round look, is heavily made up.
She sports endless eyelashes, thickly painted eyebrows and in her right ear, five earrings that peek out from under the scarf with which she half covers her head.
She also has very long fingernails;
except for the right index finger, the only one with which she can use the screen of her phone.
Thanks to him, she shows videos in which she appears surrounded by people while she passes clothes to the rhythm of the music, or next to the well-known singer Aryana Sayeed, who managed to escape from Kabul just after the arrival of the Taliban.
Haidari also shows a recording during a photo session in a studio in which she strikes different poses.
Some images in the antipodes of today's ultraconservative Afghanistan.
“Our future is destroyed because everything we did before is against the precepts of the Taliban.
How are we going to be able to continue living here?” she wonders.
Hers, more than 20,000 followers of her on her Instagram social network and more than 32,000 on TikTok have not heard from her again.
She closed the accounts.
“I am passionate about being in front of the cameras” and “I enjoy working with photographers”, can be read in her profile of the Modelstan agency.
In 2020, the year before Kabul fell to the Taliban guerrillas, Freshta placed second in her country's (Mr. and Ms. Afghanistan) beauty pageant.
Her figure, 1.74 meters tall, attracts glances through the streets of central Kabul despite being covered from head to toe.
I make her self-confident, even when she is hidden behind her mask and sunglasses,
Robina Amini worked as a journalist until the Taliban came to power.
LOUIS OF VEGA
Robin, journalist
Woman and journalist, Robina Amini, 26, seems like the perfect target.
She does not regret it, but she has fresh in her memory the times that she went as a reporter to cover in recent years the attacks carried out by the Taliban in different neighborhoods of the capital of Afghanistan.
The same ones, she says, that “now they don't let women work”, she affirms, laying her hands on her very advanced pregnancy.
Amini worked at Rasa TV and the Peshgo and Bokhdi agencies during the six years she was in the business.
Her husband, Jamshid Ahmad Ahmadi, also 26, shows the photos after the attack of which he was a victim in the street at the hands of strangers, who opened a gap in his head.
Both see little hope for the profession in the country despite the fact that he, in an attempt to turn from reality, has embarked on a new news agency project called Harir for which he is seeking funding.
They do not hide that when they have the slightest chance, they will go abroad.
Anywhere.
To the country that grants them a visa.
Journalism, and especially professional journalism, is one of the sectors that is suffering the most from the effects of the dictatorial steamroller of the Islamic Emirate.
In the last year, almost 60% of journalists have lost their jobs and almost 40% of media outlets have closed, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
They can't go on screen without having their faces covered.
Beyond the harassment of women, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has denounced arrests, censorship,
attacks and fleeing the country to be safe.
Between August last year and February 2022, 85% of women working in the media lost their jobs, while up to 300 Afghan media outlets closed, according to figures provided by Samiullah Mahdi, an Afghan journalist and consultant to the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
Akif Muhajer, spokesperson for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice
Would you have a soccer player daughter?
The resounding "no" falls immediately.
"In our culture, Islam, we can't," says Akif Muhajer directly, bluntly.
The spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a kind of morality police, does not assume the prohibition that today prevents women from practicing sports in Afghanistan.
Something similar happens with the option to work as a model.
"Our government has no problems, but it is society that does not accept it," he maintains.
The kingdom of happiness came to the country with the implementation of the Islamic Emirate a year ago if we look at his testimony.
"Ask people if Afghanistan is not now a safer country where life is more enjoyable," Muhajer says optimistically, bringing out the mantra on which the Taliban support their government.
It is enough to go out to the first street to realize that reality is very far away.
The objective of this ministry, which has come to replace that of Women, is for society to live according to the most radical precepts of Islam.
This portfolio already existed in the previous Taliban mandate between 1996 and 2001. In the following two decades, Afghanistan was a "prison" controlled by foreign troops where alcohol, drugs, corruption, excessive parties prevailed and even people were disturbed. women on the street, says the 33-year-old spokesman.
“Now all that is over” and “the girls are protected”, according to his point of view.
In effect, they can no longer move on their own if they travel beyond a distance of 78 kilometers from home.
In that case they must be "protected" by the figure of the
mahram
, her husband, father, brother... It is then that she implies that they alone are not capable or have the autonomy to solve their problems.
"All her needs in life are covered by her father or her brother until they get married and then her husband takes care of it," she details.
That does not prevent, she emphasizes, that they can work.
But at the headquarters of her ministry - and unlike others - she admits that there is not a single worker.
Muhajer says that the Ministry of Women "was created by the hand of Westerners to impose their culture": "To move women away from the path of Islam."
Mujaher speaks of the "war" waged to expel these invaders, the US-led alliance;
however, she avoids mentioning the hundreds of terrorist attacks carried out by the Taliban in which thousands of Afghans were killed.
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