KABUL – Women beaten, young men whipped just because they wore jeans. And burqas that sell like hot cakes. With the return of the Taliban, Kabul jumped back twenty years, despite the “good intentions” demonstrating by the militants of the Islamic Emirate upon their arrival in the country’s capital. 

Social networks act as a sounding board for the “new” situation. In a post published on Facebook and reported by the British newspaper Daily Telegraph, an Afghan boy said he was walking with his friends in Kabul when they were stopped by some Taliban who accused them of “not respecting Islam” because they wore jeans. Two managed to escape but the others were beaten, whipped on the neck and threatened with a gun.

But mostly women pay the consequences of the return of the Taliban. “Some women of ‘Pangea’ were beaten by the Taliban. Seeing the photos with their bruises was heartbreaking. The children witnessed scenes of unprecedented violence are very frightened,” said the Italian non-profit organization that deals with the defense of women rights and who spread images of the arrival at dawn of activists and their families in Kabul. “Since Friday we have been working tirelessly to help Kabul colleagues and their families to reach the airport. It has been a difficult day. The women of ‘Pangea’ staff and their families have been trapped in the crowd for hours, without water, even with very small children in their arms “.

And then there is the burqa. With the Taliban, the obligation to wear it has also returned. And the price has increased tenfold, because the takeover of the country has been so rapid that many Afghan women have not been able to obtain and, thus, the price of the dress that covers women from head to toe has gone up, as it turns out from the testimonies reported today by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica: an Afghan girl, maintaining anonymity for security reasons, said that her family does not have enough money to buy the three burqas, that she, her sister and her mother they have to wear, so they will buy one and share it. “If the situation gets worse, we have nothing, we will have to make one using sheets or something”, she said.

And another woman from Kabul, also anonymously, explained – La Repubblica always reports – that the price of a burqa in Kabul has increased tenfold because women rushed to the shops to buy it, before the Taliban militias reached the capital. “Some didn’t make it to the market in time before Sunday closing because the shopkeepers were in a hurry to get home”, she said. And then: “The Taliban will keep us at home. We have been fighting for years to get out of our homes and work in society and now we will have to start fighting for the same rights again, to get a work permit, to get permission to go to the hospital?”.

In the pic above, women with burqas in a market in Afghanistan (photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burqa)