Her cracked lips seemed to scream the wounds of her life. Blood seeped from the fissures in her parched skin, and her eyes, like two deep hollows, had sunken into her thin, worn face.
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To be a father of daughters in the Taliban’s Afghanistan has become a daily nightmare for Amir. Now, he says, he is more prison guard than loving parent, an unwilling and unpaid enforcer of a system of gender apartheid that he despises yet feels compelled to inflict on his two teenage girls in order to protect them from the Taliban’s rage and reprisals.
Read moreDetailsI and my colleagues at Rukhshana Media, most of whom work in secret inside the country, have a particular focus on documenting human rights violations committed by the Taliban.
Strolling through the autumn streets of Johannesburg in South Africa, it’s refreshing to see the democracy emerging from a long, unfinished struggle against racial apartheid.
In the past three and a half years, efforts beyond Afghanistan have primarily centred around the lobbying of and advocacy within political institutions in Europe, the United States, and the United Nations.
Her cracked lips seemed to scream the wounds of her life. Blood seeped from the fissures in her parched skin, and her eyes, like two deep hollows, had sunken into her thin, worn face.
But if life was hard before 2021, that was nothing compared to what Hadia faces now. As well as being unable to find work due to mounting restrictions imposed on women by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, she has been forced into hiding under threat of having her children taken away.
Mahnaz was just 15 when the Taliban returned to power and brought in a blanket ban on older girls attending school. Like many teenage girls in Afghanistan, she was devastated and furious. She was also determined to fight a ban that she saw as senseless.
