The past few weeks have been difficult for Gulnoor (32), a school administrator in a city in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Last month, in the school where Gulnoor is employed, she witnessed a tearful farewell of grade six girls, beyond which the girls in Afghanistan are not allowed to study due to ‘new rules’ imposed by the country’s Taliban rulers.
But something changed when Gulnoor was asked if Afghanistan had ‘transformed’ under Taliban’s rule, as claimed in an article in The Telegraph authored by Tobias Ellwood, a Member of Parliament representing UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party.
Ellwood, in an article published earlier this week – ‘Is it time we did business with Taliban’ – argued that the UK must reopen its embassy in Afghanistan given the ‘relative peace’ brought about by the South Asian nation’s new rulers.
Ellwood, who published his piece after a recent visit to Afghanistan, was widely criticised, especially for sidelining the repression of women’s rights in Afghanistan.
Gulnoor sent out a mildly graphic video over a messenger app that showed an authoritative man in traditional Pashtoon outfit uprooting the hair of a youngster, supposedly because his hairstyle was not in accordance to what have come to be known as ‘new rules’, a euphemism among educated Afghans for the Shariah-based arbitrary rules imposed by Afghanistan’s Taliban’s rulers since they took control of the country two years ago.
Screengrab of a video shared by Gulnoor that she attributed as an evidence to Taliban’s tyranny
“You can see how transformed the situation in Afghanistan has become,” Gulnoor said in a subsequent voice message while referring to the man being beaten up in the video.
“Nothing is positive for us women. I don’t know what he [Ellwood] saw that made him believe that the new rulers have transformed the country. Nothing is transformed. Nothing is right here,” Gulnoor added.
“Battlefields are now cotton fields full of working men and women,” Ellwood added, while referring to his recent Afghanistan visit and the purported sense of ‘relative peace’ he witnessed there.
“Yes, now our country is at peace,” Zareena, 24, told WION from a Kabul suburb. “But women of Afghanistan don’t just need peace. They need to go to schools, attend university and get jobs,” she added, referring to a series of repression of women’s rights in Afghanistan that Taliban have deployed almost as a way to assert their theological authority.
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In Afghanistan’s warred-out terrain ridden with signs of years of conflict in the country’s recent history, there are thousands of single-women households who lost the men to war. Before the Taliban’s takeover of power, the women worked in cities to provide for their households. Not any longer.
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Referring to the Taliban’s ban on beauty salons in Afghanistan, Zareena added: “When a woman [previously] working at a salon would hear that her workplace is closed, it is akin to killing her. Because that salon gave her money with which she bought food for herself and her children.”
After massive backlash, Tobias Ellwood has backtracked on his latest comments on Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan. Ellwood has admitted that he “got it wrong” and has deleted a video filmed in Afghanistan, in which he praised the Taliban.
