Afghanistan's Women Under the Taliban

"There is a need for greater advocacy efforts in support of women and girls in Afghanistan."

"In terms of number and gravity, we are still having the largest humanitarian crisis globally in Afghanistan: 28 million people are in need of humanitarian help."

"It's very important to make sure that aid will be directly and effectively delivered to vulnerable people, and that the Taliban will not be able to benefit from aid, or use aid delivery as a tool for legitimization or consolidating power."

"There have been a lot of cases of this nature [lack of formal paper trails to indicate the use of international aid to line the pockets of the Taliban] in the past few months. For international NGOs that continue to work in Afghanistan, it has been a dilemma."

"According to many international experts, these repressive measures against women and girls in Afghanistan amount to a gender apartheid."

Ambassador Hassan Soroosh, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Afghanistan ambassador Hassan Soroosh and administrator Tamim Amini doing the best they can with limited resources to provide services to Afghans in Canada and the U.S.  CBC

 

Appointed Ambassador to Canada by the previous Afghan government, Ambassador Soroosh has maintained the Afghan Embassy to continue providing consular services to Afghans in Canada, while advocating for the welfare, security and safety of Afghans everywhere. He has been involved in persuading the Canadian government to lift its legal prohibitions on delivering humanitarian aid from Canada to his country.

Ambassador Soroosh has never lost hope that in time Afghanistan by some quirk of happenstance and fate will once again be a democratic country, his people released from the theocratic Islamism forced upon his country by the Taliban since they re-secured Kabul as their barbaric fiefdom in August of 2021 with the withdrawal of U.S. and international forces, ceding the country back to Taliban rule. The international community withdrew their charitable investments with the Taliban return.

 

Young girls still go to school in Afghanistan but are excluded from education beyond that  EPA

 

Humanitarian funding and the humanitarian aid given to the struggling people of Afghanistan was severely compromised when the Taliban issued one of their female-centric edicts disallowing Afghan women to work for international NGOs. A great many changes took place with the Taliban return, one of the first being a renaming of the country to reflect their rule: the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a change unrecognized by the international community.

Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs has advised humanitarian groups that purchasing goods or hiring locals in Afghanistan involves the paying of taxes to the Taliban, considered under the Criminal Code of Canada as contributing to a terrorist group, which is how the Taliban are universally viewed. Afghanistan is a country in economic freefall, where humanitarian crises wrack the population, from a ruined health-care system to soaring rates of child malnutrition.

 

Afghan women attend a protest against their country's Taliban rulers, in Islamabad, Pakistan, on International Women's Day, March 8, 2023. Sami Yousafzai/CBS News

 

Ambassador Soroosh seeks a way to persuade the Canadian government to respond to his country's dire humanitarian situation, made more urgent in the wake of one of the coldest winters on record to hit the country. Under the Taliban, women and girls may no longer attend school after the primary grades. More recently universities have been placed off limits to women. Women must again as in the previous Taliban rule, be attended only in female-only hospitals and women-only medical professionals.

Woman are now barred from going to gyms and parks. Public flogging of women has been resumed for those who leave their homes absent the chaperoning presence of a male guardian. Amnesty International has urged the UN Human Rights Council to put a stop to Taliban impunity, citing "the suffocating crackdown on the rights of women and girls, and targeted executions of ethnic Hazara people".

Ambassador of Afghanistan to Canada Hassan Soroosh stands outside the Embassy of The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in Ottawa, July 7, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

"It requires collective international efforts in terms of putting greater pressure on the Taliban. Because it seems that the Taliban so far have not felt the real pressure to change their policies and approach."

"Politically speaking, as experience shows in the case of Afghanistan, no regime and no system can survive without embracing the will of the people."

Afghan Ambassador Hassan Soroosh