BY Azada
Roya* sits on a faded yellow blanket in a small room in her rundown rental house in Kabul. Her voice is calm, but the pauses between her answers are long. Her eyes sometimes stare into space, revealing more than she can say.
The mother-of-two’s gaunt face looks older than her 30 years. She wipes tears from her eyes with bony hands.
“Which one of my problems got me here? That I became unemployed or that after becoming unemployed, my marriage fell apart after 13 years?” she asks.
Roya lost her job the day the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021. When she returned home to her husband in a nearby province, he beat her unconscious, banished her, and forced her to leave without their oldest son. Roya took their two-year-old son.
When Afghanistan’s political system collapsed in August 2021, many women’s lives collapsed along with it. Among those who fell particularly hard were the women in the Afghan security forces.
Most of them fled their posts before the Taliban had been even a day in power. No one trusted the promises of clemency from the country’s new rulers. Within months, their distrust would prove right as reports of Taliban revenge killings and disappearances spread throughout the country.
Those with means left Afghanistan, but many others simply tried to hide. Roya was one of them, and so began her secret life in poverty.
A childhood dream to protect others
As a child, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Roya would always answer, “A policewoman”.
It was an unusual response for a girl born into a deeply conservative culture in southeastern Ghazni province’s remote Jaghori district. Women were rarely seen in such a role and there was little social encouragement for girls to aspire to it.
But the US-backed Afghan government in Roya’s teenage years ran advertising campaigns to increase women in the police force. The strategic plan was to increase the number of women in the security forces to 10,000 by 2021. But this plan collapsed along with the government that same year.
Roya would eventually get her childhood wish. But not before her family had their wish fulfilled, in line with prevailing traditions in their community.
At age 15, before finishing school, Roya was married off to the son of a family in their neighbourhood. She moved to the home of her husband and his parents.
Some years later, they moved from Jaghori to the Ghazni’s capital city by the same name. For Roya, the move was a big deal. For someone with her upbringing, the “big city” brought opportunity. And not long after the birth of her second son, Roya began working in the reception of a local business. It boosted her confidence, and opened other doors.
An invitation after a heartfelt address
On 27 February 2020, the Center of Islamic World Cultural Center in Ghazni city organized a program to commemorate Afghanistan’s National Soldier’s Day. Roya delivered a speech in the Hazaragi dialect, praising the security forces.
Her address received a standing ovation.
“When I went on stage, I began the article in the name of God and read it in the sweet Hazaragi dialect, dedicating it to all the security forces,” she says.
“When I finished the article, all the security forces stood up, clapped for me, and cheered. At the end of the program, I was honored with an appreciation letter and an envelope of cash. I couldn’t believe that I had such a wonderful speech.”
Roya had won US$150. She says she was so happy that day that she didn’t even open the envelope. She proudly handed it straight to her husband.
The next day when Roya arrived at her office, there was a lunch invitation for her and her colleagues from the Afghan National Army Recruitment Command.
They all attended together. While they were there, the recruitment chief of Ghazni’s security forces invited Roya to join the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Roya was over the moon.
She returned home excited, hoping for her husband’s approval, with a military uniform she received as a gift.
But her husband’s family, with whom they still lived, opposed it. She says that they were very traditional in their ways and could not accept women who were in the military.
But despite their resistance, Roya was determined.
Security training begins
In March 2020, without the blessing from her husband’s family, Roya left for the training in Kabul.
“When I became a member of the national army, I felt very happy,” she says. But her husband’s family saw her as a sinful woman.
There was a perception among some in Afghanistan that women who joined the security forces were promiscuous or exposed themselves to sexual proclivities. A study published by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in 2019 found that seven percent of women in the Afghan security forces had experienced sexual harassment by male colleagues or commanders.
“Only my salary mattered to my husband and his family. They counted on it every month and took it from me, but still I was considered a sinful woman,” Roya says.
In her absence, her husband took a second wife. This was permitted in their culture and religion without needing to divorce the first wife. But after that, Roya did not want to return home.
InSeptember 2020, Roya took a job as a guard in Kabul’s high security Pol-e-Charki prison. She was earning a decent salary of around 20,000 afghanis (US$285) per month, so she rented a house for herself and took her two sons to live with her in Kabul’s Omid Sabz neighborhood.
Despite feeling she had paid a high price with her husband and his family’s rejection, part of Roya was proud to have finally achieved that childhood dream.
But the satisfaction was short-lived.
Roya, the first person in the photo. (Photo: Supplied)
A dream cut short as Afghanistan’s leaders fled
Roya would work in the Afghan National Army for less than a year. On 15 August 2021, when Kabul fell to the Taliban, Roya was already at work. Like so many thousands of Afghans unsure what it meant, she quietly left her workplace and went home, never to return.
It was a bitter day for Roya who remembers it as the day her dreams were destroyed.
Knowing she would no longer be able to work in the prison, Roya took her two boys and returned to her husband in Ghazni.
“As soon as I got home, my husband angrily took my children away from me. Then he pulled me by my hand into another room and beat me to an extreme,” she says.
He yelled at her. “‘Now that the administration collapsed, you miss home? Did you come to live together again? Get this thought out of your head, evil woman!’”
Roya was beaten so severely that she lost consciousness for several hours.
By 28 February 2022, Roya’s husband divorced her in a Taliban court. He also wanted to keep both the children, but eventually relented with Roya’s persistence to let the youngest stay with her.
“The day I got divorced, the day turned black as night. Wherever I sat down on the street curb, I cried bitterly,” she says.
“Several times, I collapsed on the streets of Ghazni city, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself brought to a corner by passing women.”
Although she seems to suffer from memory problems and confusion at moments, the bitter moment of parting with her eldest child, who is now about 8 years old, is still very much alive for her.
“It was morning. I don’t remember exactly what day it was. I had packed my clothes with tears, bidding farewell to everyone,” she says.
“Only my eldest son was crying bitterly, saying, ‘Mama, don’t leave me alone.” When I stepped out of the gate, my son ran after me several times, screaming, Mama, Mama, take me with you! Don’t leave me alone!’”
With money borrowed from her husband’s brother, Roya traveled with her youngest son to her father’s house back in Jaghori district. But as the days passed, Roya grew only more isolated and depressed. Severe headaches forced her to see a doctor. He recommended hospital treatment.
The bitter return to Kabul
Roya says she was hospitalized at Aliabad hospital in Kabul for two months for her mental and emotional problems. When she was discharged, she decided to stay in Kabul.
Renting a home in western Kabul, Roya now earns a living by cleaning and doing other people’s laundry.
Since her husband divorced her, he has refused to allow her to see her eldest son.
She says the grief of the separation from her child still breaks her down in spontaneous tears.
The thought of killing herself has crossed her mind several times, but her youngest son – now five years old – has stopped her.
“One night when I couldn’t find anything to eat, my son asked me for food several times, I didn’t know what to say to him. He hardly slept because of hunger,” she says.
“I also cried because of his oppressed state. I’d decided to hang myself and not see my son’s hunger anymore.
“I tried to hang myself with my scarf tied to the wall, but my eyes fell on the dried tears of my child who had fallen asleep with his hungry stomach and crying eyes. I realised, after this, he would be more unfortunate.”
Her landlord kicked her out of her home in March this year when she fell behind on rent. She had fallen from the stairs and broken her leg and injured a hand, reducing her capacity to work.
“I told him that I would work more and pay the house rent, but he did not accept it and kicked me out,” she says.
“I borrowed a packet of mouse poison from the alley shopkeeper and poured water into the glass.”
But again, the sight of her young son stopped her from taking the poison.
The days when even bread is too hard to eat
Roya doesn’t know what lies ahead for her and her son. She says that most of the time she doesn’t even have dry bread to eat and lives off what the neighbours sometimes bring her.
Just a few days ago, she says she sold six of her plates to a secondhand shop in a Kabul market for 100 Afghanis ($1.30) to buy some dry bread for her son.
Untouched fragments of bread were still sitting in the plastic bag the next day. It’s not that her son wasn’t hungry, but the bread was too tough and dry to eat, she says.
*Name have been changed for security reasons.
