Some demonstrators took refuge in stores, where they were chased and then beaten with rifle butt.
Le Monde with AFP
Shooting in the air and buttocks: Taliban violently dispersed, on Saturday August 13, in Kabul, a demonstration of women for the right to work and education, almost a year after the return to power of Islamists in Afghanistan.
Forty women chanting “bread, work and freedom” paraded in front of the Ministry of Education before a group of Taliban fighters disperse them by shooting in the air by gusts, some five minutes after the start a walk. The demonstrators wore a banner on which one could read “August 15 is a black day”, in reference to the date of the taking of Kabul in 2021 by the Taliban. “Justice, justice. We are fed up with ignorance,” they also chanted.
Taliban armed with assault rifles blocked a crossroads in front of the demonstrators and started to shoot in the air for long seconds. One of them simulated a shot targeting the demonstrators, noted a journalist from the France-Presse agency (AFP).
Some demonstrators then took refuge in nearby stores, where they were chased and then beaten with a shot of rifle by Taliban. They also confiscated their mobile phones and struck journalists.
The demonstrations for women’s rights have been increasingly rare in the capital, especially after the arrest at the start of the year of organizers of these rallies, some of which have remained in detention for several weeks. >
Obligation to wearing the full veil in public 2>
Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, fundamentalist Islamists have gradually crossed out the freedoms conquered by women in the past twenty years, since the fall of their previous regime (1996-2001). They imposed a series of restrictions on civil society, a large part of which aim to submit women to their fundamentalist conception of Islam. They have largely excluded the latter of public jobs, have restricted their right to move and have prohibited the access of girls to college and high school.
The last restriction dates from May, when the government has published a decree, approved by the supreme chief of the Taliban and Afghanistan, Haibatullah Akhundzada, making compulsory for women the wearing of the full veil in public. The Taliban clarified that their preference was going to burqa, this full veil most often blue and wireless in terms of the eyes, but that other types of veil leaving only the eyes would be tolerated.
The Taliban also considered that less than women have a pressing reason to go out, it was “better for them to stay at home”. All these measures “describe a model of total sexual segregation and aim to make women invisible in society,” the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett.
These last two decades, the Afghanes have acquired new freedoms, returning to school or applying for jobs in all sectors of activity, even if the country has remained socially conservative.