By Freshta Ghani
The Taliban stopped close to 80 female students of the American University of Afghanistan from flying out of Kabul airport on Thursday, the university officials told Zan Times. The Taliban stopped them because the girls didn’t have their maharm, close male relatives with them.
Three female students of American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) told Zan Times that the Taliban prevented them from travelling to Qatar. AUAF confirmed that 109 students were scheduled to travel to Doha, Qatar on August 25, but the Taliban prevented 79 female students from boarding the flight. “The flight arrived in Doha as planned, but none of the unaccompanied female passengers were permitted to board the flight,” Jeff Gardner, AUAF’s acting chief of staff explained in a statement shared with Zan Times. “Some of the students were to remain in Doha at AUAF facilities at Education City, and others were to transit to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to enroll at the American University of Central Asia,” Gardner stated.
“We went through all the procedures at the airport and boarded the plane when a few Taliban came and ordered us to get off the plane,” said Rabia, one of the AUAF students. After pulling them out of the plane, the Taliban confined female students for four hours. “We were hungry and thirsty from morning until three in the afternoon; the Taliban were coming in and going out in groups to laugh and insult us,” Rabia says. “They called us American spies, stooges, and said, ‘You will never achieve your dream of going to America,’” Rabia explained last Friday, her throat sore from crying. “They did not allow us to go out. Our passports and documents were taken from us. They took pictures and videos of our documents,” recounts Sudaba, an engineering student at AUAF.
“They stood in front of us with guns in their hands or hanging from shoulders, teasing us, saying, “Now the Islamic Emirate is ruling here, you are not allowed to travel anymore,” said Rabia. “To scare us even more, another Talib would switch off and on the lights and chuckle. We were just crying, and we had no idea what was going to happen to us.”
AUAF, which had been attacked by the Taliban in 2016, closed its campus when the Taliban returned to power and started to resettle some of its students, staff, and alumni. Ian Bickford, the AUAF president, told NPR in early August that half of the students who were enrolled at the time the campus closed have left the country and now live in 20 countries. “More will leave to join us in Qatar. We anticipate that once the campus in Qatar is operational, all of the women who were enrolled at AUAF last spring will have left Afghanistan and, very hopefully, most or all of the men as well,” he said.
But for students travelling on Thursday, it didn’t go as planned.
“Everything was well organized and the university officials had assured us that not having a mahram wouldn’t be a problem, but the Taliban prevented girls because we did not have mahram,” said Sudaba, the engineering student.
It was in March that the Taliban refused to allow women travelling without male chaperones to board domestic and international flights. Still, some solo women were permitted to travel. AUAF students interviewed for this report said some women, including 12 female students of their university, had travelled through Kabul’s airport in mid August.
“The threat and [the 2016] attack on the university made our families very worried, but we took the risk and accepted the threats for the sake of a better future,” says Samira, an economics student.
She is hopeful that the university officials will find a solution, noting that she planned to return to Afghanistan after finishing her studies. “Even when I was preparing for the trip and saying goodbye to my family, I told my mother that I would return,” Samira explained to Zan Times.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees.
