More than a year has passed since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. A year has passed since that human tragedy. In these 365-plus days, we watched with horror and disbelief what happened to women. We saw the Taliban ban girls’ education and women’s work. They deprived women of the right to move freely and travel. We saw that misogyny and femicide were normalized. The Taliban cracked down on women’s public presence and even erased their images and symbols from public spaces.
They have built their version of utopia with whips, guns, and naked violence. The Taliban utopia is a hungry and famine-stricken land, devoid of women, dissidents, artists, and queer people. They are a ruinous political order in which women are degraded and forced into domestic confinement. In the absence of the rule of law, their fate is in the hands of the most regressive social forces. Now, no woman has immunity, security, and dignity under any roof and behind any wall. Now, there is not a day when the lifeless bodies of women and girls do not fall to the ground in some corner of this land.
These are only a part of the bloody record of a group that deprives women of the right to work, a door to a dignified and honourable living. However, it is also impossible not to see the indigenous rebellion of women to overcome this horror. Can we find a more legitimate movement than the women’s movement under the Taliban?
Although the struggle is limited, fragmented, and mostly urban, it is still independent and progressive through its slogan, “Work, Food, Freedom.” In the last year, in the absence of any structural support, women have continued to struggle to own the house and the street. Women are the only social force who have stood tall against oppression. It has been these women who have resisted the normalization of the Taliban’s murderous apparatus. At home and on the street, they have raised a loud and courageous voice!
But how did this come about? From the first hours of regaining power, the Taliban expelled women from offices and professional jobs. For tens of thousands of vulnerable women, who are among the most deprived social groups and in one of the poorest countries in the world, this was effectively a mass death warrant. This order left resistance as the only option for the majority of women. Prohibiting the right to work for self-supporting women such as workers, teachers, farmers, women with disabilities, small producers, etc., who had no economic support other than daily work, is a declaration of blatant enmity. Therefore, women protesters, some taking part in political action for the first time, took to the streets to oppose the Taliban.
Overnight, women in a highly traditional society, mostly without experience in such movements, stepped into the political scene by organizing small, independent gatherings. The movement that began in the days after August 15, 2021, with the small gathering of women in Kabul who had a clear message: women would not accept confinement inside their houses.
Within a few days, a wave of peaceful street protests started. In Herat, more than 50 women workers and teachers came into the streets. Then, the streets of Mazar, Kabul and Bamyan witnessed the historic confrontation of women’s peaceful protests against the Taliban’s guns and violence. Repression, arrests, and torture pushed the demonstrations indoor.
Now, both the house and the street have become arenas of struggle for women and other marginalized groups. It seems that there is no border between the house and the street anymore. Both are the scenes of confrontation of two irreconcilable worldviews: violence and peace. Women raised the urgency of the slogan “Work, Food, Freedom” for everyone. Now, two opposing poles are confronting each: on one side, the women of Afghanistan are fighting for their right to self-determination; on the other side are the Taliban and their supporters, who are trying to impose their ideological counter-narrative by denying the reality.
This unequal confrontation is making visible the pain and suffering of women and other marginalized groups. Therefore, we must look for ways to end the oppression of women by speaking up and breaking the silence. We are witnessing the ultimate confrontation: the women of Afghanistan using light as they confront the Taliban’s darkness.
