![]() Divorced and unmarried women face similar problems. But after decades of war, Afghanistan has an estimated 2 million widows who may not have a living father, brother or son able or willing to serve as their mahram. Students who have won scholarships abroad are consumed with anxiety about whether they will be allowed to board their flights without a mahram, group WhatsApp chats shared with the Guardian showed.Ī husband, brother, father, son or nephew can fulfil the role of mahram. I am a person who studied and worked all these years, now an illiterate man can stop me, ask questions, argue with me, and I cannot argue with him.” I know that if I travel far they are likely to stop me,” she said, adding that she found the situation unbearable. “Because of my mother’s situation I want to take her abroad to a better hospital, but I don’t dare to. ![]() Since the Taliban ordered most female civil servants to stay away from work and then advised women not to leave home except in cases of necessity, she can count on her hands the number of times she has left her own neighbourhood. ![]() She used to have a senior government job, travelling abroad and extensively across Afghanistan. These extreme controls fuel the fears of women such as Wazhma, even about journeys that should be legal, like taking her mother to hospital in Kabul. ![]() Health workers said they had personal experience of women being barred from accessing medical help without a mahram in at least two districts, one in central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province and one in southern Helmand. They told the Guardian that Taliban fighters have barred them from even short journeys, including commuting to work, sometimes using indirect tactics such as threatening drivers who take solo female passengers.Ī man walks past a vandalised mural depicting a group of women in Kabul. Now we can travel again.”īut many others across Afghanistan have reported restrictions on women’s movements that go far beyond the official regulations. “This went on for a few weeks then they abolished. I wasn’t allowed to board the plane, and had to wait in the airport for two to three hours, with 20 or 30 other women,” she said. “It was in March, they had just circulated the new notice that no woman can travel to another city without a mahram. Raihana* was barred from boarding a plane earlier this year for a work trip but says women have since been allowed back in the air alone. The rules have been enforced sporadically, with some officials turning a blind eye to solo travel. If a woman is found to have broken the Taliban’s dress codes, their male relatives face punishment. Officially, any woman travelling more than 75km (46 miles) or leaving the country needs a mahram. Instead a man is deemed responsible for their presence in public, including how they dress and where they travel. In the Taliban’s extremist reimagining of Afghanistan, women are not fully autonomous citizens of their own country. Women who live in households without a close male relative, whether through tragedy, circumstance or choice, now exist in a legal limbo, because they do not have a close male relative to act as a mahram, or “guardian”. Most Afghan women have had to learn to endure new restrictions and controls over the last year, but there is one group whose lives have been particularly curtailed. She is terrified that as women out alone at night, even on their way to a hospital, they would be stopped and harassed by the Taliban. Her father is dead, she is unmarried and her teenage sister is disabled. Wazhma* lies awake worrying what she will do if her sick, elderly mother needs emergency medical help at night.
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