Younger girls residing beneath oppressive Taliban rule in Afghanistan have dared to share their hopes and fears for 2025, which vary from an finish to “gender apartheid”, to easily going for a stroll within the park.
The 5 girls of their twenties have all had their research or careers interrupted because the Taliban seized management in 2021 and aggressively cracked down on girls’s rights.
“My want for 2025, is to have a life free from the Taliban flag,” one lady says in a recorded video message, despatched covertly to our special correspondent Alex Crawford.
“This isn’t solely my want, however the want of all Afghan girls.”
A second lady hopes “girls in Afghanistan can be recognised as human beings”, and one other desires of with the ability to go “to the park, to the playground and to the beauty salons“.
The ladies, who’re aspiring journalists, writers, attorneys and lecturers, all spoke anonymously over fears they’d be punished in a rustic that violently curbs freedom of expression and lately banned contact with foreigners.
All at the moment are largely confined to their houses.
The Islamic fundamentalist group has already excluded girls from larger training and most jobs, and forbidden them from talking or exhibiting their faces in public.
On Saturday, it banned home windows in new buildings that look into locations the place a lady is likely to be seen.
And on Sunday it mentioned it might shut any NGOs nonetheless using girls, two years after it instructed them to cease Afghan females working for them, allegedly as a result of they didn’t put on the Islamic headband accurately.
Within the extremely private recordings, the ladies say they need to “be taught once more” and “stroll on the streets with none concern” – and hope the Worldwide Prison Court docket will prosecute members of the Taliban.
One says regardless of their “tough” circumstances, Afghan girls “nonetheless have hopes and nonetheless have desires”.
“After I see the birds flying within the air, I stare at them and assume so deeply [about] how fortunate they’re,” she says.
She thinks the identical when she “[hears] about women in different nations, how profitable they’re… I additionally want we may do the identical. We’re additionally human beings”.
She provides: “I dream of a day after I may proceed my training… have freedom of speech and may say no matter I would like… A day when the entire Afghan women can go to high school once more, of their beautiful uniforms, which I actually miss.”
And eventually, she desires “that sooner or later all of the Afghan women can exit of their homes and stroll on the streets with none concern”.
She provides: “I request all of the people who find themselves listening to us at this time to always remember us… I hope none of you expertise what we’re at this time.”
