Mick Hartley

A reminder of the forgotten women of Afghanistan, abandoned by the shameful withdrawal of US troops in 2021 and now left to suffer alone:

Barred from school for 1,000 days, girls in Afghanistan face forced marriage, violence and isolation with no end in sight.

Just over three years ago, Asma’s future contained many possibilities. Aged 15, she was at secondary school. After that lay the prospect of university and then onwards, striding forwards into the rest of her life.

Like many Afghan girls, she understood that education was her route out of the isolation and repression that had constricted the lives of her mother and grandmother under the previous Taliban regime. She was part of a new generation of Afghan women who had the chance to build independent and economically autonomous lives.

In May 2021, a few months before Taliban militants swept to power, Asma was in class when bombs began exploding outside her secondary school. She woke up in hospital to learn that 85 people, mostly other schoolgirls, had been killed. By the time she had started to recover, the Taliban were in charge and her chances of returning to school were over for good.

It is now past 1,000 days since the Taliban declared schools only for boys, and an estimated 1.2 million teenage girls such as Asma were in effect banned from secondary schools in Afghanistan.

What has happened to them since has been catastrophic: forced and early marriage, domestic violence, suicide, drug addiction and an eradication from all aspects of public life, with no end in sight.

“We’ve now reached 1,000 days, but there is no end date to the horror of what is happening to teenage girls in Afghanistan,” says Heather Barr from Human Rights Watch. “What the Taliban have done is not put the dreams of all these girls on hold, they have obliterated them.”…

A United Nations survey last December found that 76% of women and girls who responded classed their mental health as “bad” or “very bad”, reporting insomnia, depression, anxiety, loss of appetite and headaches as a result of their trauma.

Almost one-fifth of girls and women also said they hadn’t met another woman outside their immediate family in the three preceding months. Another survey from the Afghan digital platform Bishnaw found that 8% of those who took part knew at least one woman or girl who had attempted to kill themselves since August 2021….

Barr says the Taliban have taken away “girl’s social networks, their friends, the outside world”. “They can’t go to school, or to national parks, or beauty salons or the gym or, increasingly, outside the house at all without fear of intimidation. They’re taking away everything that makes them human,” she says.

She says the international community cannot continue to ignore what is happening to teenage girls in Afghanistan.

But they will. It's not an issue that seems to concern anyone.