In mid-June, 17-year-old Shakiba* was arrested by the Taliban’s morality police (the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) along with dozens of other women. Her alleged crime was “improper hijab.” Shakiba was fully covered in a chadar namaz—a full-body prayer veil—but she was wearing a little eye makeup, and that was [...]
This month marked the beginning of the academic year in Afghanistan. Usually it follows immediately after Nowruz, which fell on March 21st this year. But this year, because several festivals—Ramadan, Eid and Nowruz (the beginning of the new year)—came one after another, the Taliban government announced that the school year would start a week later. [...]
An estimated 89,000 lives lost; 30,000 arbitrary detentions; 3.4 million people displaced. In the five years since the February 2021 coup, these ever-rising figures have come to define Myanmar. From a legal standpoint, the military, operating as the State Administration Council (SAC), asserts de facto control through territorial occupation and administrative force. On the other [...]
There are moments in everyone’s life when it feels as though everything has come to an end—overwhelmed by pressure, stress, and problems. As a woman living in Afghanistan under the systematic violence of the Taliban, I have experienced this deeply. I remember the day my younger sister walked toward school with her books, only to [...]
In recent years, several countries—including Croatia, Malta, and others—have recognized femicide as a distinct crime. The Italian government and parliament also took this step, acknowledging that killing a woman solely because of her gender is not just homicide, but a crime rooted in gender-based violence. These legislative shifts are historic because they name what was [...]
It was a late September afternoon when I spotted a pair of beautiful earrings on Instagram. Curious, I followed the account’s links to an online shop. Alongside the other items, they offered curated gift packages. When I messaged them, I learned the owner was a young woman. The shop owner, Diana (a pseudonym), responded with [...]
“Left out here and driven away from there” — this old Dari proverb describes a person who has been rejected from both sides, meaning they can neither stay in the first place nor be accepted in the second. For 20-year-old Yasna, a young Afghan woman, and hundreds of thousands of other Afghan people who fled [...]
Is this the last time you’ll hear from me? It could be, as the Taliban’s crackdown on all of our rights has extended to internet technology. A ban on fiber optic internet has begun its slow trickle from province to province, and it could be only a matter of time before the whole country is [...]
The earth shook beneath Afghanistan once again, and as rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble, one devastating truth became clear: half our population remains invisible even in our darkest hour. As aftershocks continue to rattle the earthquake-stricken regions, the images and videos emerging from the disaster zone tell a familiar, heartbreaking story. Men dig [...]
As the global community marked International Human Rights Day earlier this month, millions of Afghan women and girls remained trapped in their homes, cast out of their schools, work and public life by repressive Taliban policy. Last year, in response to these then-already-ongoing human rights violations, the US government announced new sanctions against Taliban officials [...]
