For an Afghan woman, the difference between going abroad or staying in her country, like most people, is currently all-or-nothing, she lives laughing or she dies alive.

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This is how Khadija describes her on the phone from her home in Kabul, terrified after the Taliban took over her city, while seeking help from her sister-in-law Mina, a 28-year-old Afghan who has grown up in Madrid ever since. She was seven years old, and regrets not being able to do anything for her. “To die in life,” Effie was sentenced in English Khadija, 23 years old.

I am not going to university tomorrow. The Taliban are like animals, they do not understand the Qur’an. For them women should not be educated. It’s all over for us.”, finish.

Abandonment and anguish

The feeling of abandonment and pain is total for this young Afghan woman, who says her husband has discouraged her from going to university, since returning home she saw a Taliban patrol in the street, and from now on she is in danger as she walks alone across the road. City.

They have already declared that women over the age of 15 should marry. They don’t want us to be independent, they’ll kill us if we go out alone, or throw acid in our faces.”Khadija, who does not believe in the relaxation of the norms against women proclaimed by the Taliban in connection with the government they led from 1996 to 2001, denounces.

We want to leave Afghanistan, but we can’t. That’s awful”Says this Afghan student.

Meanwhile, in a Madrid shopping mall near his home, his Spanish sister-in-law Mina speaks fluently about her job at a multinational company. He went with his family to Spain at the age of seven, during the previous Taliban regime, to escape oppression and uncertainty.

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Mina is one of 69 Afghans residing in Spain, according to Spain’s Ministry of the Interior. She thanks her parents for growing up in Spain, where she feels protected by law and citizens alike, “with great respect for us.”

She studied tourism at university, does not wear the Islamic headscarf and says she enjoys going to central Madrid with her friends on the weekends.

But she is very worried about her relatives in Kabul: “No woman in the world deserves to live in confinement and intimidation. With the Taliban, they will not be able to use their cell phones, have Facebook or go out with their friends in the city.”

worst country for women

Even one of its spokesmen declared during the Taliban era that “the face of women is a source of corruption.”

A study by UN Women describes the systematic segregation of Afghan society in those years as “gender apartheid,” in which a woman could not work, study from the age of eight or go out to her balcony without a man. A girl should not talk loudly or laugh in the street, no stranger should hear a woman’s voice.

Afghanistan was already in 2011 the worst country for a woman to live in, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and now everything indicates that the situation for them will only get worse.

Mina remembers that in her parents’ house she had pictures of her aunt in Kabul in the 1970s, in a miniskirt and fashionable clothes, like any urban woman of the time.

“You won’t go back a few years, you’ll go back to the Middle Ages,” firmly affirms. She freely married her husband in 2019 and the two have lived together ever since.

However, Khadija believes that from now on no woman will be able to choose her life. He believes that most Taliban have “delusions and mental problems” and “don’t understand what they are.” AfghanistanMany of them are not from here.

It’s the difference between being a woman in a country with or without liberties, being lucky to be protected by a state or waking up one day in a huge women’s prison.

Source: EFE

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