On this International Women's Day, Afghan women and girls are living under one of the most totalitarian gender apartheid systems the modern world has ever produced. And yet they are still here. Still resisting. Still speaking, even when speaking has been made a crime. ---- Afghan women have never stopped fighting. Long before the Taliban, they lived under cycles of war, invasion, and patriarchal violence that tried to erase them from public life. Soviet occupation, Mujahedeen warlordism, civil war, each chapter brought new forms of brutality against women's bodies and women's freedom. They survived all of it.
When the first Taliban regime seized power in 1996, it built a system of total gender apartheid. Women were banned from schools, from work, from public spaces. They could not leave their homes without a male guardian. They were beaten in the streets for showing their faces, for laughing too loudly, for existing without permission. For five years, an entire generation of girls grew up locked inside their homes, their futures stolen by men with guns and patriarchal dogma.Then came 2001. Western powers arrived with bombs and promises. Schools for girls opened. Women entered universities, parliaments, courtrooms, hospitals, newsrooms. These gains were real, built not by the generosity of occupiers but by the courage and determination of Afghan women themselves who seized every millimeter of space available to them, knowing it could be taken away at any moment.
It was taken away.
In August 2021, the Taliban returned. Western forces withdrew, leaving behind not liberation but a new prison. Within days, everything collapsed. Girls above 12 years old were banned from school. Women were banned from most workplaces. Universities closed their doors to women entirely. The streets emptied of women's presence. Afghan women watched twenty years of struggle erased in a matter of weeks.
Since 2021 the Taliban have gone further with every passing month. Women cannot travel without a male guardian. They cannot visit parks, public baths, or gyms. Their voices cannot be heard by men outside their family. Female aid workers have been banned, leaving millions of women without access to healthcare. Girls born after 2009 have never known a day of secondary school. An entire generation is being deliberately kept illiterate, isolated, and invisible under a system of patriarchal totalitarianism that treats women's minds and bodies as property of the state and the family.
And still they resist. Underground schools meet in secret. Women record and smuggle out testimony at enormous personal risk. Afghan women in exile organize, document, and refuse to let the world forget. Inside Afghanistan, women have stood in the streets with handwritten signs knowing they will be beaten and arrested. They do it anyway.
The liberation of Afghan women did not come with American bombs in 2001 and it will not come from any outside power. Twenty years of occupation left behind a state built on corruption and dependency that collapsed the moment its foreign sponsors left. Liberation from above, whether from Washington, Moscow, or any capital, is always temporary, always conditional, always serving the interests of the liberator rather than the liberated.
The only liberation that lasts is the one built from below, by the women themselves, by horizontal networks of solidarity, by the refusal to accept invisibility as a permanent condition.
On this 8th of March we honor every Afghan woman who defied them. Every girl who studied by candlelight in a secret classroom. Every woman who walked into a street knowing she would be beaten. Every woman who smuggled out testimony so the world could not pretend not to know. Every woman in exile who keeps the struggle alive from afar. Every woman inside Afghanistan who is alive and still fighting.
They have banned their faces. They have banned their voices. They have banned their education, their movement, their presence in the world.
They have not banned their resistance.
And they never will.
Work, Bread, Freedom!
Education, Work, Freedom!
Woman, Life, Freedom!
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A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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