"Women's protests are the only resistance against the Taliban

Two years after the reconquest of the Taliban in Afghanistan, "women's protests are the only resistance against the brutal regime," the Afghan activist and security expert researcher Farkhondeh Akbari told Télam, who lamented that "there is no a geopolitical interest in defending them" in the face of what is a "gender apartheid" and "the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world.

Akbari left the Asian country at the age of eight in 1998 under the previous Taliban takeover, lived as a refugee in Pakistan and Iran and in 2003 arrived in Australia, where she graduated with two master's degrees and a doctorate related to international relations and diplomacy. , and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Monash University in Melbourne.

Belonging to the Hazara Shiite minority, the object of attacks by extremist groups such as the Taliban, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, his research focuses on peace negotiations with non-state armed actors and both from his academic and humanitarian work he continues to militate to improve the situation in Afghanistan.

Especially after August 15, 2021, the date on which the Islamists entered Kabul after a rapid campaign in which they reconquered much of the territory and took control of the country that they had already ruled between 1996 and 2001.

This advance had its gestation a year earlier with an agreement signed between the Taliban and the United States, then under the presidency of Donald Trump, which set a schedule for the final withdrawal of international forces after 20 years of occupation, in a negotiation that did not count with the participation of representatives of the then Afghan government or civil society.

Upon retaking power, the Taliban assured that they would abandon their repressive methods and their strict version of Islam, but since then "they have produced more than 50 decrees, laws and regulations that regulate all aspects of women's lives, such as prohibiting them from going to school, university or work or having to be accompanied by a sibling or parent to go somewhere," Akbari explained.

And he narrated that millions of widows who left behind four decades of war cannot support their children, who die of hunger, and the women who protest are repressed, kidnapped and raped.