At the point when the Taliban held onto power, the administrator of the main women’ safe house in a northern Afghan city fled.
Left deserted were 20 women who had escaped an assortment of homegrown revolutions, some manhandled by spouses or family, others constrained into early relationships with more seasoned men.
Before long, the Taliban showed up at the safe house in the city of Pul-e-Khumri.
They gave the women two options: Return to their destructive families some of whom had compromised them with death for leaving or go with the Taliban, surveyed by one of the ladies, Salima, who asked only that her first name be used.
Taliban dread
The vast majority of the women decided to get back, dreading the Taliban more than their families. Salima said she knew about no less than one who was since killed, probably by a furious relative.
Yet, Salima chose to leave with the Taliban. She didn’t have the foggiest idea what they would do, however she had no place else to go, having escaped her oppressive, drug-dependent spouse months sooner. Presently she winds up housed in a jail however ensured and safe, she says.
Under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan’s profoundly moderate and regularly ancestral society are frequently dependent upon bygone codes of conduct that consider them answerable for the honor of their families.
They can be killed for basically wedding a man of their choice. They are frequently hitched at adolescence. Escaping even a harmful spouse is considered disgraceful.
Hundreds in prison for ‘ethical quality violations’
Many women are imprisoned for supposed “profound quality wrongdoings,” including infidelity or fleeing from home, despite the fact that they are not authoritatively violations under the Afghan reformatory code.
In the course of recent years, activists set up many women’ asylums around Afghanistan. However, even before the Taliban takeover, moderate Afghans, including government authorities, saw them with doubt, as spots that help women and young women oppose their families or abet “moral violations.”
women’ asylums are only one of a heap of social changes that turned out to be more predominant in the past 20 years or didn’t exist when the Taliban last took power in 1996 everything from web-based media and the web to money managers and women judges.
Presently since overwhelming Kabul and clearing into power on Aug. 15, the firm stance aggressor bunch is grappling with how to manage the changes, with the Taliban initiative on occasion dubious and contenders on the ground following up on their own.
Salima was taken to Kabul, alongside another lady, Razia, who had lived in the safe house almost a year in the wake of escaping a ruthless brother by marriage.
With no place to put them, the Taliban put them in the neglected women’ segment of Afghanistan’s primary jail, called Pul-e-Charkhi.
The jail was vacant on the grounds that when the Taliban took over Kabul, they liberated every one of the detainees, including a huge number of men, 760 women and in excess of 100 kids, as per the jail’s new Taliban executive, Mullah Abdullah Akhund.
Questionable future
The Associated Press was given uncommon admittance to the women in the jail. Presently there are just six women there, including Salima and Razia.
A huge steel door prompts the women’ jail. Rolls of security fencing are hung on the 20-foot-high dividers. Inside, the women move openly with their kids.
Salima’s 5-year-old little girl Maria and child Mohammad, 6, go through the vast majority of their day in a primary, enormous, covered room. There is no school and simply a monster red teddy bear and a couple of little toys for their entertainment.
“We for the most part supplicate and read the Quran the entire day,” said Salima.
Salima said that she has no clue about what’s on the horizon, yet for the present, with no cash and no family, she said she has a sense of security here.
However, Mujdha, one more lady in the jail, said she needs her opportunity. She had been pregnant by a beau yet her family would not allow her to wed him, and on second thought constrained her to wed a family member.
She fled. “I let them know I could never remain with him,” she said. The family detailed her to the Taliban, who captured her and her boyfriend.
Mujdha conceived an offspring in jail to a little girl 15 days prior, before her capture. She hasn’t seen her beau, imprisoned somewhere else in the jail, and he presently can’t seem to meet his newborn child girl.
“I need to leave, yet they say I can’t,” she said.
Akhund said a court will decide whether to charge her, adding, “It isn’t right that she left her better half. She has no right.”
Since taking force, the Taliban’s reaction to women’ safe houses has shifted. In the western town of city, a couple of are closed down, aforesaid Suraya Pakzad, a women’ privileges dissident from Herat who opened a few safe houses.
Pakzad said Fri in instant messages from a spot sequestered from everything that she faces dangers from all sides from the Taliban and from the teams of those who discovered asylum in her havens.
For quite a long while, Pakzad and different women squeezed for a voice in the exchanges between the US-upheld administration of the time and the propelling Taliban.
They expected to guarantee rights for women in any last course of action. Presently, all at once, they are scrambling for their own security.
Pakzad shared a capture warrant for herself and 7 completely different activists and columnists from western Afghanistan, given by the new religious movement police boss in Herat. The warrant blames the eight for “spreading purposeful message against the Moslem Emirate” and blames Pakzad for “contribution with Western nations to unfold prostitution.”
However, Mahboba Suraj, who runs a haven for 30 women in Kabul, said the Taliban have come and researched the sanctuary and let the women stay there safe. She said she was visited by different divisions of the new Taliban government, including senior authorities.
“The higher ups were totally awesome. They need to assure us furthermore, comprehend that they include issues inside their own kin” who may not be as strong in women’ safe houses, she said.
For the time being, “they need to have insurance for us,” she said. “Say thanks to God, I do accept that. I sincerely do.”