For months, Shamail Naseri has been moving house-to-house to evade arrest by Taliban authorities. Her crime: Raising her voice to protect Afghan women who have faced increasing marginalisation since the Taliban came to power in August 2021.
“The Taliban attempted twice to arrest me, but it was unsuccessful. I hid and switched off my phone, and they could not find me,” Naseri told Al Jazeera by phone from an undisclosed location in the capital Kabul.
The Taliban promised women’s rights and free speech when they stormed to power. But Afghanistan’s new rulers have gone back on their promises, imposing curbs on women’s movement, introducing dress codes for women, and shutting down high schools for girls – bringing back memories of their repressive rule in the 1990s.
Naseri, along with other women’s activists, has been actively involved in providing support to vulnerable Afghan women after the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan government dissolved critical state support structures like the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and after key organisations, including the largest network of women’s shelters in the country, closed their doors.
Despite the threats to her safety, Naseri remains undeterred in her mission, and unlike all the other Afghanistan-based activists in this story, felt comfortable sharing her full name publicly.
While women-led street protests in Afghanistan have attracted worldwide attention, behind the scenes, female activists have steadily been building support networks for marginalised women, creating grassroots organisations, documenting cases of gender-based violence, and opening safe spaces for women in various parts of the country.
Although women advocates are slowly making strides in organising themselves in Afghanistan, these efforts remain limited in scope and geography, and according to experts, are as of yet unable to fill the immense gap in women’s services in the country.
“At the moment this is a very big need for women, so we cannot just give up,” said Duniya, a Kabul-based coordinator with a local NGO in Afghanistan who asked not to be identified using her real name for security reasons. “We are at least trying to do something by taking some risk.”
The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has led to a 28 percent decrease in women’s employment in the country, according to the United Nations, and rates of domestic violence, forced disappearances, torture of peaceful women protesters, and other forms of gender-based violence have risen sharply since the group’s return to power, according to Amnesty International and other human rights organisations.Duniya’s organisation had established a grassroots network across 20 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces that promoted democratic values, women’s rights, and solutions to gender-based violence over the past decade.
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