Taliban Use Tear Gas, Fire Into Air To Break Up Women’s March - Forbes

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Topline

A small group of women marching Saturday in Kabul for the right to work and to have a say in the new government were pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed while Taliban soldiers, reportedly special forces, fired live rounds into the air, multiple sources reported, contradicting assurances from senior leaders that women would be allowed to have rights in their new government.

Key Facts

A group of 50 women started marching Saturday toward the presidential palace, Al Jazeera reported, a protest triggered by comments from a high-ranking Taliban leader that women “may not” end up serving in senior positions of a new government.

Eventually, Taliban members blocked the women and tried to break up the protest with pepper spray and tear gas, Razia Barakzai, 26, told Al Jazeera.

One woman was “struck” by the Taliban, Barakzai told Al Jazeera, which reported that a video of a woman, whose head was bleeding, said the Taliban hit her.

It was the second protest in Kabul in two days, the Associated Press reported.

Crucial Quote

“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” Farhat Popalzai, a university student, told the AP. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”

Big Number

4. That’s at least how many times women in Kabul and in Herat have led protests for their rights, the country’s third-largest city, according to Al Jazeera.

Key Background

Since taking control of the country August 15, Taliban leaders have said that women would have rights under their rule. "Women will be given rights in accordance with Sharia," Abdul Ghani Baradar, a cofounder of the Taliban who is expected to head the new government, said August 25, NBC News reported. Those pledges have been met with skepticism, because the first time that the deeply conservative religious group ran Afghanistan—from 1996 to 2001, until the U.S. invaded—women were not allowed to have jobs, go to school or leave their home without a man to accompany them.

Tangent

Most of the roughly 250 Afghan women who worked as judges in the fallen government’s legal system have not been able to leave the country, according to Reuters. Because the Taliban have released imprisoned men around the country, the judges are worried that the men they put behind bars will track them down for revenge. Horia Mosadiq, an human rights activist from Afghanistan, told Reuters that some newly free men have called to threaten the lives of women who worked as police officers, prosecuting attorneys and judges.