Politics

‘We want to work’: Afghan women protest in Kabul

Kabul. Oct 31 (EFE).- A group of former female workers protested in the Afghan capital on Monday, seeking their right to work amid mounting human rights violations against women and girls under the Islamist Taliban regime.

Flashing their educational degree certificates, the former government employees gathered inside a public park in the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood of Kabul.

However, the protesters alleged that the Taliban did not allow the women to demonstrate, citing a lack of police permission to protest.

“We wanted to remind the world that the women in Afghanistan have been forgotten,” social activist Zakia Wahdat, who was spearheading the protest, told EFE.

She said women represent the “real capacity” to work, and the Taliban had removed it from society.

The protesters carried placards that read: “The eliminated capacities of Afghanistan” and “We want to work.”

Wahdat said they had been calling on the international community for the last year about their plight.

She recalled that despite initial promises that women would be allowed to exercise their rights under the Sharia law, the Taliban excluded women and girls from public life, including government offices.

Margahlay Naqebzai, a former gender specialist at the interior ministry, said she was jobless for the past year.

Wahdat alleged that Taliban men “violently tore our degree” certificates and banners, asking them to go to the police district for permission to protest.

The protest came a day after some female students of Badakhshan university alleged that the Taliban government was barring them from attending classes because they did not wear a burqa – a head-to-toe veil.

The United Nations and global rights groups have, over the 14 months, flagged rights violations against women and girls in Afghanistan since the Taliban entered Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul and took control of the country on Aug.15 last year.

Women hold no cabinet positions in the de facto Taliban government.

The Islamist regime has curbed women’s right to political participation and banned girls from attending school past the sixth grade.

They have barred women from working most jobs outside the home.

Women are banned from traveling long distances without a male chaperone. EFE

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