The Haqqani's Afghanistan: Year 4 (II)
The authorities of the second Taliban regime, now in their fourth year of interim government, have continued with their particular and arbitrary interpretation of sharia and with the strangulation of Afghan women's rights, to the point of rendering them completely invisible. Afghan women already suffered the curtailment of their rights with the arrival of the first Taliban regime between 1996 and 2001. After the fall of the first regime, there were two decades of transition until 2021, led by Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, who attempted to rebuild the country and transition to democratic institutions.
Article 22 of the 2004 Constitution, approved during Hamid Karzai's term in office, stated the following: ‘General guarantee of equality. All forms of discrimination and distinction between Afghan citizens are prohibited. Citizens of Afghanistan, men and women, have the same rights and duties before the law.’
During the twenty years of the transitional regime between the two Taliban periods, girls and women experienced changes in their status, which were particularly visible in the main Afghan cities. They once again had access to professions previously banned by the first Taliban regime, as well as to education and university. In terms of women's access to certain professions, 4% of the Afghan National Police force, approximately 4,000, were women (1), as were around 270 judges, 11% of the Afghan judiciary (2).
Both professions were targets of radicalism. In January 2021, judges Qadria Yasini, 53, and Zakia Herawi, 34 (3), were shot dead on their way to work. Two months earlier, a member of the Afghan police force suffered a brutal attack in which she was not only shot as she left work, but also stabbed in the eyes (4), miraculously surviving.
But it was not only normal for women to be present in public activities, it was also normal for them to be present in private businesses. It was not unusual to see women entrepreneurs at the helm of their companies in the country's major cities, which, although generally a big step forward, did not mean the full or total integration of Afghan women into the labour market in a society as tribal and conservative as Afghanistan's, especially in the rural part of the country, which accounted for nearly 70% of the territory.
However, it has been under this second Taliban regime that the drift against women's rights of the first regime has continued, as has the repression of women. During the fourth year of the regime, directives have continued to be passed that eliminate women's ability to work outside their homes. In December 2024, the Taliban Ministry of Higher Education dismissed all female administrative staff from universities, offering the possibility of replacing them with male members of their families (5). But if this was happening in women's jobs at universities, private businesses were not far behind. At the end of November 2024, three cafés run by women in Herat were closed down by order of the Ministry of Vice and Virtue (6). Similarly, in Nangarhar, an order was issued in December 2024 prohibiting women from speaking in public on smartphones, which are now the vast majority of mobile phones (7), This was one of the most extreme measures taken in relation to the media, issued by the Ministry of Vice and Virtue delegation in Herat, which, in January 2025, banned female news presenters from appearing on television, even if they complied with the rules on the hijab, because, according to the delegation, this incites or provokes (8).
Nevertheless, there are still Afghan women who defy the Taliban regime's prohibitions and continue to operate clandestinely in the shadows. Such is the case of Reyhana and Fahr, two women who, in the fields of work and education respectively, defy the regime's prohibitions.
Reyhana uses her own home as a clandestine beauty salon (9), taking the utmost care not to be detected by the regime's militias, who have also banned beauty salons, but she cannot stop working because it is the only income for a family of five.
In 2019, Fahr opened a library with 4,000 books (10), which two years later were hidden in a safe place in Kabul when the Taliban entered the country and soon afterwards banned Afghan women from continuing their education at university. All this motivated Fahr to form online resistance networks, where, like a book club, PDF files are exchanged, with the utmost vigilance to ensure that there are no regime infiltrators among her readers.
The fact is that women's access to secondary education and university has been one of the issues that the interim Taliban government settled in a totalitarian manner within a few months of coming to power, banning female education from the age of twelve. It has been such a controversial issue that even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) asked the Taliban regime in 2023 to allow access to all levels of education (11), but the regime's authorities did not go beyond paying lip service, and two years later, everything remains the same.
We can compare this to countries where citizens live in an Islamic society but educational rights are exercised without distinction of gender. As an example, we will look at two countries that contrast with the Taliban regime.
In the United Arab Emirates, a country where the legal system is divided between Sharia law and civil law, 70% of the female population has higher education (12). For this reason, Emirati billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, aware of the situation of Afghan university women, approved a scholarship in 2023 for a group of 100 women from Afghanistan (13), which included the university to study at, accommodation, transport and medical insurance, all with a view to ensuring the maximum comfort and safety of the Afghan university students. Unfortunately, the Taliban regime authorities prohibited this from going ahead, preventing the students from leaving the country, with only 3 of the 100 women achieving their goal.
Jordan is another Muslim country where Islamic law coexists with civil law. The campus of Amman's main university is a clear example of inclusion, where Jordanian female university students are fully integrated into the various fields of study, both as students and as teachers, so much so that the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of Jordan took the initiative to launch the so-called ‘Feminist Scholarship’ (14), an initiative aimed at empowering and strengthening the role of female students and graduates of the Centre in Jordanian society. However, it should not be forgotten that there is little point in women being fully immersed in university education if, once they have completed their studies, they are barred from entering the labour market, which is the other major problem faced by Afghan women.
Conclusions
The right of women and girls to all levels of education is an issue that only the Taliban regime rejects. Afghan women are denied the right to higher education in order to make it even more difficult for them to achieve economic, professional and social independence, which is a totalitarian way of destroying the talent of a section of society.
Afghan women have been arbitrarily erased from knowledge, as well as from most occupations outside their homes, and even within their homes, they must act with the utmost discretion so as not to be observed from outside in case they carry out any activity that, in the eyes of the Taliban patrols, is prohibited.
The systematic persecution of women's fundamental rights, such as education and freedom of movement, has reached such a point that in early July, the International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, one against the supreme leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and the other against the president of the Taliban Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani (15).
RTVE Noticias reported on a letter written in August 2024 by an Afghan citizen to an association working with the country, in which she described her deep frustration at not being able to escape the clutches of the regime in August 2021, explaining the dramatic turn her life had taken since then and the condemnation that being a woman in Afghanistan entails. In tribute to this woman, a follower of our Spanish literature and of all Afghan women in search of their freedom, her petition is transcribed below (16):
‘Do not forget us. Do not abandon us in this darkness. Because here, in this forgotten corner of Afghanistan, there are hearts that still beat, dreams that refuse to die, and women who, despite everything, dare to hope for a better tomorrow.’
Luis Montero, political scientist and Master's degree in International Geostrategy and Jihadist Terrorism.
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