 | | People who fled their homes in northern Afghanistan camping out in a park in Kabul this month, before the Taliban entered the city.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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"I am a journalist and I am not allowed to work. What will I do next?" |
— Khadija Amin, a prominent anchorwoman on state television in Afghanistan |
On Tuesday morning, Beheshta Arghand, a newscaster with the privately owned Tolo News channel, interviewed a Taliban official, asking him about the Taliban's house-to-house searches in the Afghan capital. |
"The entire world now recognizes that the Taliban are the real rulers of the country," said the official, Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban's media team. "I am still astonished that people are afraid of Taliban." |
The remarkable scene of a Taliban official taking questions from a woman journalist was part of a broader campaign by the Taliban to present a more moderate face to the world and to help tame the fear gripping the country since the insurgents seized the capital on Sunday. |
But hours later, a prominent anchorwoman on state television, Khadija Amin, tearfully told a Clubhouse chat room that the Taliban had suspended her, and other women employees, indefinitely. |
"I am a journalist and I am not allowed to work," said Ms. Amin, 28. "What will I do next? The next generation will have nothing, everything we have achieved for 20 years will be gone. The Taliban is the Taliban. They have not changed." |
 | | Ms. Amin (left), at her anchor desk on Thursday. She was replaced on Sunday by a Taliban official (right).via Khadija Amin |
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The stories of the two journalists reflect the uncertainty and deep anxiety Afghan women face as they try to assess what will befall them as the Taliban take control of the country. Millions are afraid of a return to the repressive past, when the Taliban barred women from working outside the home or leaving the house without a male guardian, eliminated schooling for girls and publicly flogged those who violated the group's morality code. |
But Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different this time. In a news conference in Kabul on Tuesday, a Taliban spokesman said that women would be allowed to work and study. Another Taliban official said that women should participate in government. |
"We assure that there will be no violence against women," the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said. "No prejudice against women will be allowed, but the Islamic values are our framework." |
Pressed for details, he said only that women could participate in society "within the bounds of Islamic law." |
The previous Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, was a bleak period for Afghan women, and the years since have been ones of much suffering and hardship men and woman alike. The one widely recognized bright spot: the treatment of women. |
The question now is whether the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law will be as draconian as when the group last held power. |
There are already scattered signs that, at least in some areas, the Taliban have begun to reimpose the old order. |
Women in some provinces have been told not to leave the home without a male relative escorting them. |
In Herat, in Western Afghanistan, Taliban gunmen guarded the university's gates and prevented female students and instructors from entering the campus on Tuesday, witnesses said. |
In the southern city of Kandahar, women's health-care clinics were shut down, a resident said. In some districts, girls' schools have been closed since the Taliban seized control of them in November. |
Women there said they were starting to wear the head-to-toe burqa in the street, partly in fear and partly in anticipation of restrictions ordered by the Taliban. |
At Kabul University, in the capital, women students were told they were not allowed to leave their dorm rooms unless accompanied by a male guardian. Two students said they were effectively trapped because they had no male relatives in the city. |
In Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, Aliya Kazimy, a 27-year-old university professor, said that women shopping alone in the city's bazaar were turned away and told to return with male guardians. |
"I am from the generation that had a lot of opportunities after the fall of the Taliban 20 years ago," she said in a text message. "I was able to achieve my goals of studying, and for a year I've been a university professor, and now my future is dark and uncertain. All these years of working hard and dreaming were for nothing. And the little girls who are just starting out, what future awaits them?" |
Keep reading the story here. |
Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | Girls at a school this year in Sheberghan, Afghanistan.Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times |
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- "I fear for my Afghan sisters." In the last two decades, millions of Afghan women and girls received an education. Now the future they were promised is dangerously close to slipping away, writes Malala Yousafzai. [Read in Opinion]
- "I always think she'll go back to Planet Grigorian when she's had enough of us here." Asmik Grigorian is an opera star with a bottomless appetite for risk. [Read the story]
- "OK, I'm going home, and my daughter is going to be born in less than 24 hours." Many consider Breanna Stewart the greatest female basketball player of this era. Now they can also call her a mom. [Read the story]
- "When you talk to workers, they don't want to sign up for a 9-to-5 job." Hayden Brown, who runs Upwork, a site that matches freelancers with employers, discusses how freelancing is changing work. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley. |
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