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Where women took shelter from abuse, Taliban now in control

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Taliban seized energy, the operator of the one ladies’s shelter in a northern Afghan metropolis ran away. Left deserted had been 20 ladies who had fled a wide range of home horrors, some abused by husbands or household, others pressured into early marriages with older males.

Quickly after, the Taliban arrived on the shelter within the metropolis of Pul-e-Kumri.

They gave the ladies two choices: Return to their abusive households — a few of whom had threatened them with loss of life for leaving — or go along with the Taliban, recalled one of many ladies, Salima, who requested solely that her first title be used.

A lot of the ladies selected to return dwelling, fearing the Taliban greater than their households. Salima stated she knew of at the very least one who was since killed, possible by an offended member of the family.

A member of the Taliban stands guard contained in the Pul-e-Charkhi jail. Bulent Kilic / AFP by way of Getty Photos

However Salima determined to depart with the Taliban. She didn’t know what they might do, however she had nowhere else to go, having fled her abusive, drug-addicted husband months earlier. Now she finds herself housed in a jail — however protected and secure, she says.

Whether or not beneath Taliban rule or not, ladies in Afghanistan’s deeply conservative and infrequently tribal society are sometimes topic to archaic codes of conduct that maintain them chargeable for the respect of their households. They are often killed for merely marrying a person of their alternative. They’re usually married at puberty. Fleeing even an abusive husband is taken into account shameful.

Lots of of girls are jailed for so-called “morality crimes,” together with adultery or working away from dwelling, though they aren’t formally crimes beneath the Afghan penal code.

Over the previous twenty years, activists arrange dozens of girls’s shelters round Afghanistan. However even earlier than the Taliban takeover, conservative Afghans, together with authorities officers, considered them with suspicion, as locations that assist ladies and women defy their households or abet “ethical crimes.”

Girls’s shelters are simply one in every of a myriad of social modifications that grew to become extra prevalent prior to now 20 years or didn’t even exist when the Taliban final took energy in 1996 — every little thing from social media and the web to businesswomen and girls judges. Now since overrunning Kabul and sweeping into energy on Aug. 15, the hardline militant group is wrestling with easy methods to take care of the modifications, with the Taliban management at occasions unsure and fighters on the bottom performing on their very own.

An empty yard on the Pul-e-Charkhi jail in Kabul, Afghanistan. Felipe Dana / AP

Salima was taken to Kabul, together with one other lady, Razia, who had lived within the shelter almost a yr after fleeing a predatory brother-in-law.

With nowhere to place them, the Taliban put them within the deserted ladies’s part of Afghanistan’s primary jail, known as Pul-e-Charkhi. The jail was empty as a result of when the Taliban took over Kabul, they freed all of the inmates, together with hundreds of males, 760 ladies and greater than 100 youngsters, in keeping with the jail’s new Taliban administrator, Mullah Abdullah Akhund.

The Related Press was given uncommon entry to the ladies within the jail. Now there are solely six ladies there, together with Salima and Razia.

Inside, the ladies transfer freely with their youngsters. Salima’s 5-year-old daughter Maria and son Mohammad, 6, spend most of their day in a primary, giant, carpeted room. There isn’t a college and only a big crimson teddy bear and some small toys for his or her amusement.

“We largely pray and browse the Quran all day,” stated Salima.

Salima stated that she has no concept what the longer term holds, however for the current, with no cash and no household, she stated she feels secure right here.

However Mujdha, one other lady within the jail, stated she needs her freedom. She had been pregnant by a boyfriend however her household refused to let her marry him, and as a substitute pressured her to marry a relative. She ran away. “I instructed them I might by no means stick with him” she stated. The household reported her to the Taliban, who arrested her and her boyfriend.

Mujdha gave start in jail to a child daughter 15 days in the past, quickly after her arrest. She hasn’t seen her boyfriend, jailed elsewhere within the jail, and he has but to satisfy his toddler daughter.

“I wish to depart, however they are saying I can’t,” she stated.

Akhund stated a court docket will resolve whether or not to cost her, including, “It’s fallacious that she left her husband. She has no proper.”

Since taking energy, the Taliban’s response to ladies’s shelters has assorted. Within the western metropolis of Herat, a number of have been shut down, stated Suraya Pakzad, a ladies’s rights activist from Herat who opened a number of shelters.

Pakzad stated Friday in textual content messages from a spot in hiding that she faces threats from all sides — from the Taliban and from the households of the ladies who discovered refuge in her shelters.

For the previous a number of years, Pakzad and different ladies pressed for a voice within the negotiations between the U.S.-backed authorities of the time and the advancing Taliban. They hoped to make sure rights for girls in any ultimate association. Now, in a single fell swoop, they’re scrambling for their very own security.

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Pakzad shared an arrest warrant for her and 7 different activists and journalists from western Afghanistan, issued by the brand new Taliban police chief in Herat. The warrant accuses the eight of “spreading propaganda towards the Islamic Emirate” and accuses Pakzad of “involvement with Western nations to unfold prostitution.”

However Mahboba Suraj, who runs a shelter for 30 ladies in Kabul, stated the Taliban have come and investigated the shelter and let the ladies stay there unhurt. She stated she was visited by varied departments of the brand new Taliban authorities, together with senior officers.

“The upper ups had been completely the most effective. They wish to defend us … and perceive that they’ve issues inside their very own folks” who is probably not as supportive of girls’s shelters, she stated.

For now, “they wish to have safety for us,” she stated. “Thank God, I do consider that. I actually do.”

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