: Angelina Jolie: The World Must Not Look Away From Afghanistans Women #WorldNEWS I recently met a young Afghan refugee in Rome who had been months from qualifying as a doctor when the Taliban overthrew

Angelina Jolie: The World Must Not Look Away From Afghanistans Women #WorldNEWS
I recently met a young Afghan refugee in Rome who had been months from qualifying as a doctor when the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in August 2021. Her older sister was studying dentistry at university. Her two younger sisters were doing brilliantly in school. Overnight, they and 14 million other Afghan women and girls lost their right to go to high school or university, their right to work, and their freedom of movement. As we spoke, she hugged her father, who’d worked for decades as an expert in rural development in Afghanistan. He left everything behind when he fled with his family. With tears streaming down her face, she told me that she wasn’t sad for herself, but for all the women of her country.
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Long before 9/11, the stoning and whipping of Afghan women and their exclusion from education was a cause of outrage globally. American and other western leaders spoke of restoring basic rights for Afghan women in the same breath as removing the Taliban as justification for NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan. The sight of Afghan women raising themselves up through their own efforts over the last twenty years—with the support of many Afghan men—was a bright light during years of continuing violence and suffering for the people of Afghanistan. One year ago, Afghan women worked as doctors, teachers, artists, police officers, journalists, judges, lawyers, and elected politicians. Afghan children braved repeated suicide attacks on their schools. The picture for rural women was very different, particularly in areas still controlled by the Taliban, but the overall sense of progress was unmistakable. All of this has been overturned with unimaginable speed.
The daughters of Afghanistan are extraordinary for their strength, resilience, and resourcefulness. I’ve met Afghan women who, as young children during the previous Taliban era, had to dress as boys in order to be able to secretly go to school. They then became journalists and lawyers and contributed to building a better future for their country, believing the promises made by their leaders and the international community that they would be guaranteed a voice in Afghan society.
Those promises were broken, and it is hard to think of a greater betrayal. Women are again being beaten in the streets or taken from their homes at night and tortured, and the country’s jails are filling up with female political prisoners. There are reports of girls being kidnapped into forced marriage with Taliban leaders. As a woman and mother, it torments me to even imagine what it must be like for Afghan families—especially those who lived through the Taliban era of the 1990s—to feel so powerless.

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