Younger ladies residing underneath 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 ladies of their twenties have all had their research or careers interrupted because the Taliban seized management in 2021 and aggressively cracked down on ladies’s rights.
“My wish for 2025, is to have a life free from the Taliban flag,” one lady says in a recorded video message, despatched covertly to our particular correspondent Alex Crawford.
“This is not only my wish, but the wish of all Afghan women.”
A second lady hopes “women in Afghanistan will be recognised as human beings”, and one other goals of with the ability to go “to the park, to the playground and to the beauty salons”.
The ladies, who’re aspiring journalists, writers, legal professionals and academics, all spoke anonymously over fears they might be punished in a rustic that violently curbs freedom of expression and not too long ago banned contact with foreigners.
All are actually largely confined to their properties.
The Islamic fundamentalist group has already excluded ladies from greater 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 girl may be seen.
And on Sunday it mentioned it might shut any NGOs nonetheless using ladies, two years after it advised them to cease Afghan females working for them, allegedly as a result of they didn’t put on the Islamic scarf appropriately.
Within the extremely private recordings, the ladies say they wish to “learn again” and “walk on the streets without any fear” – and hope the Worldwide Legal Courtroom will prosecute members of the Taliban.
One says regardless of their “difficult” circumstances, Afghan ladies “still have hopes and still have dreams”.
“When I see the birds flying in the air, I stare at them and think so deeply [about] how lucky they are,” she says.
She thinks the identical when she “[hears] about girls in other countries, how successful they are… I also wish we could do the same. We are also human beings”.
She provides: “I dream of a day when I can also continue my education… have freedom of speech and can say whatever I want… A day when all of the Afghan girls can go to school again, in their lovely uniforms, which I really miss.”
And eventually, she goals “that one day all the Afghan girls can go out of their houses and walk on the streets without any fear”.
She provides: “I request all the people who are hearing us today to never forget us… I hope none of you experience what we are today.”
