The New Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
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| Students attend class under new classroom conditions at Avicenna University in Kabul, Afghanistan September 6, 2021. Social media handout/via REUTERS |
"Sharia ... does not allow men and women to get together or sit together under one roof.""Men and women cannot work together. That is clear. They are not allowed to come to our offices and work in our ministries."Waheedullah Hashimi, senior figure, Taliban"She [former member of the previous Afghan parliament] has been told she will be killed if the Taliban get hold of her. They have already raided her home; they have already hanged her dog.""The best outcome she believed if she is caught by the Taliban is to be shot and killed. What she fears is being brutalized and her family being brutalized.""She has been abandoned and if women like her are all killed, there won't be any women left in Afghanistan to take on the positions the Taliban is offering them."Nusrat Ghani, British Conservative Member of Parliament"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is home for all Afghans. [The Taliban repeatedly extended negotiation invitations with leaders of the opposition forces in Panjshir] but unfortunately, unfortunately, without any result.""But we are still trying to ensure that there is no war and that the issue in Panjshir is resolved calmly and peacefully."Amir Khan Motazi, senior Taliban leader
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Taliban members patrol
after they entered the Panjshir Valley, the only province the group had
not seized during its sweep last month in Afghanistan on September 6,
2021. Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images |
Panjshir's mountains have welcomed the presence of the National Resistance Front led by Ahmad Massoud, along with local militias and remnants of army and special forces units holding out against the Taliban. They joined in battle, the greater numbers of Taliban fighters with their newly-acquired military weaponry inherited from the former Afghan military and abandoned U.S. military bases, giving them an obvious advantage, allowing them to claim the pacification of the Panjshir Valley, now in their hands. Where not only resistance combatants have lost their lives but valley civilians as well.
The Taliban of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is not in the habit of graciously forgiving its adversaries and allowing them to get on with their new lives under Taliban rule. It is much more efficacious as they see it, to just kill the offenders and take them out of contention.
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Afghan resistance
movement and anti-Taliban uprising forces take part in military training
at the Abdullah Khil area of Dara district in Panjshir province on
August 24, 2021. Ahmad Sahel Arman | AFP | Getty Images |
As for the former government's female MPs, 67 in number, half remain in the country unable to reach Western evacuation opportunities. Fearing for their lives they remain in hiding. Soft-peddling their renewed opportunity to rule the country, Taliban leaders have spoken promisingly, almost ingratiatingly to the Western societies that had been so generous in providing aid funding to the impoverished country where corruption at every level is simply a way of its cultural antecedents.
Assurances that women's place in society is vouchsafed, that girls may continue to attend school that women will be allowed to achieve higher education levels, to work and to thrive under the Taliban -- under sharia law -- these issues represent a real problem in persuading Western benefactors to continue providing the country with financial aid to enable it to rebuild its infrastructure and refinance its economy. Funding that has been withheld until such time those with the purse strings are assured that the Taliban no longer plans to continue its misogynistic agenda.
The Taliban appear now to fully implement sharia in its image, irrespective of pressure from the international community urging it to permit women the right to work wherever they wish. Initially the Taliban agreed it intended to allow women to study and to work within limits laid down by Islamic law. Women were barred from education and employment from 1996 to 2001 and confined to their homes but for those times male relatives accompanied them in public garbed in black burqas.
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| Students attend class under new classroom conditions at Avicenna University in Kabul, Afghanistan September 6, 2021. Social media handout/via REUTERS |
Billions have been pledged by donors with a view to helping Afghanistan now assailed with total privation where poverty and hunger spiralled upward since the Taliban regained power, resulting in foreign aid disappearing. According to UN Secrtary-Genral Antonio Guterres, it was not possible to venture how much financial aid was promised responding to an emergency UN appeal for $600 million to aid the crisis-torn country. "The people of Afghanistan are facing the collapse of an entire country -- all at once", he said, appealing for aid.
The possibility of food supplies running out by month's end led the World Food Program to announce that 14 million people stood on the brink of starvation. Even as UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet spoke of Western misgivings in aiding the Taliban, accusing them of breaking promises, once again ordering women to remain in their homes, of keeping teens from attending school, and continuing to violently persecute former opponents.
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| Veiled students attend a Taliban rally at the Shaheed Rabbani Education University in Kabul on Saturday. EPA |
Labels: Afghan Girls, Afghan Opposition, Afghan Women, Afghanistan, Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, September 15, 2021
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