Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Islamabad (Urdu Point. DW Urdu. June 18, 2024) Fauzia is a single mother of a five-year-old son. Her husband fled the family after the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in August 2021, fearing reprisals.
Fauzia told DW, “I was a police officer and worked for the National Security Forces.
When the Taliban came, we were living in Kabul. My husband left us and I had to hide with my son. We have been running for our lives for over a year. We change houses every two months and go to a relative."
Afghan women struggling in everyday life
Violations of women's rights continue in Afghanistan, United Nations
Since the Taliban came to power, many former police officers and soldiers have disappeared, or face execution, because they are considered traitors.
Fauzia works as a cleaner to earn her living. This is the best job they can find. His relatives are now his helpers but they too cannot do much in the name of help.
Job and school now a big dream for women
According to the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization, at least 90 percent of Afghanistan's population lives in poverty.
More than half of the population of 40 million people, 28.8 million, depend on humanitarian aid for their survival. According to the United Nations, about 95 percent of Afghan citizens do not have enough to eat, and women-headed households are the most vulnerable. The number has reached almost 100 percent.
'A casualty every two hours': the life-and-death battle of motherhood for Afghan women
After regaining power in Afghanistan, the Taliban promised to respect women's rights within Sharia boundaries.
But in practice he introduced many new laws and political measures to disenfranchise women and girls across the country. Among them, women are prohibited from working, studying and even leaving their homes without wearing a head-to-toe veil.
According to UN data, about 1.5 million girls and young women are systematically deprived of their right to education.
The plight of single mothers is particularly dire. Azadeh Sherzad, one of only a handful of female reporters in the Afghan capital, says her colleagues are trying to raise the voice of women in Afghanistan, albeit with caution. Together and limited.
"I have spoken to at least 50 single mothers in the last two years," she told DW.
Single mothers still work clandestinely in Kabul. She works like cooking, sewing clothes, in salons or cleaning.” He said the situation is even more different in small towns and villages.
"It's not possible to work (even secretly) when everyone knows each other and the Taliban has total control. Women are at the mercy of their relatives and forced to obey them," she explains. are
Sometimes they are forced to become a man's second or third wife."
Women are forced to feel themselves 'prisoners' and men the jailers
Heather Barr, associate director for women's rights at Human Rights Watch, told DW that for Afghan girls, "the ban on education has completely taken away all their plans for the future."
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Single mothers without adult sons or brothers are practically confined to their homes because they have no male relatives to support them in public.
"The women and girls we talk to often say they feel like prisoners. They feel like walls have been pulled up around them," Barr said.
It really is an experience of being a prisoner and the men and their families are forced to guard the prison."
Boys are abandoning education for employment
Due to severe poverty, single mothers are often forced to send their children to work. Teenage boys are pressured to take responsibility and start earning money.
"They work in the fields outside the city, selling trinkets on the streets, cleaning shoes," Sherzad told DW from Kabul.
"These children are often exploited and sexually abused. But their mothers have no choice but to send them to work," he added.
As young girls are pulled out of schools, boys from single-mother families are also forced to give up their dream of education to support their families.
Former police officer Fauzia, like many other single mothers in Afghanistan, is desperate and struggling to improve her situation.
"I am thinking of selling my kidney, I want to flee the country with my child," says Fauzia.
C/S (Shabnam Van Hien)
