Afghan women are in a hopeless situation – and yet they still hold hope. Let’s follow their lead

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Mellissa Fung is a Canadian journalist based in London, and the author of Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram.

Late one evening this past April, two teenaged sisters stepped off an airplane at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and into a new chapter of their lives.

For nearly a year, Kawsar and Somaia Mohammadi had lived in exile in Pakistan. The year before, they had fled Afghanistan after the Taliban, which had taken back power in the country in August, 2021, issued a fatwa against Kawsar; if she had stayed, or if she was sent back, she would surely be executed. Her crime, as an 18-year-old: repeatedly defying the Taliban by organizing underground classes for girls who were banned from school.

They were safe, or at least safer, in Islamabad. A U.S.-based non-governmental organization, the Euphrates Institute, helped get them there, and paid for their living expenses. But with no final destination planned and no other country willing to open its doors, they languished in a dangerous limbo – a danger that was eventually realized when Pakistan started deporting Afghans whose visas had expired.

In May of last year, someone reached out to me about their plight. At the time, I was also at a loss, knowing that the application process for Canada’s expedited program to bring in Afghan refugees had closed. I explored scholarship opportunities at various colleges and universities, and whether student visas might be a possibility, but nothing seemed to bear fruit.

Then, miraculously and out of the blue, the Toronto-based Afghan Women’s Organization reached out to me. I had worked with them two years ago to bring several Afghan families to Canada, and they told me they had two spaces left under Canada’s expedited program. The only caveat: It would require private sponsorship. We would need to raise $40,000 quickly, and I would need to find them a sponsor in Canada who would help them settle.

The Euphrates Institute reached out to its network, and – as I have had to do so many times over the past three years – I reached out to mine, asking for donations to help Afghan women come to Canada. Once we raised the money, I called on my dear friend, Maureen Taylor, to ask if she would act as the sisters’ sponsor. Without so much as a hesitation, she said yes.

“I had already been committed to helping another young male Afghan refugee,” she told me. But, she added, “the whole process to actually get his application approved was taking so long, and although we haven’t given up on bringing him here, it seemed like these two sisters might be accepted more quickly.”

It has been three years this month since the Taliban regained control of the country, and just about the only thing they have accomplished in this time is to reduce women’s rights to rubble. “It’s been three miserable years for women and girls living under Taliban rule,” said Sahar Fetrat, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. “The systematic repression of women and girls’ rights and freedoms … has been relentless.” She tells me that activists in Afghanistan often ask her if the world’s response would be different if this kind of gender apartheid was happening anywhere else. It’s a question she can’t answer.

The international community, at one time so focused on women’s rights in Afghanistan, has been mostly silent. The United Nations – despite Richard Bennett, the UN’s own special rapporteur for Afghanistan, finding that the Taliban has created an “institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human civility, and exclusion of women and girls” – recently held a conference on Afghanistan without inviting a single Afghan woman, apparently in deference to the Taliban’s demands.

Still, Afghan women persist. They gather to protest, despite the restrictions and risk of reprisals. They continue to take to the streets, calling for “food, work, freedom” and demanding the right to go back to school. It’s hard to imagine the courage it must take, knowing the repercussions that await: systematic detention, and the potential for harsh corporal punishment.

In fact, Taliban jails are proving to be a new place of horrors for women. Evidence continues to emerge about prison guards perpetrating heinous crimes against those who have been thrown in jail for even a minor violation of the hijab law. Last month, a devastating report came out about a female human-rights activist being tortured and gang-raped in prison by Taliban guards. Another case involved a well-known female YouTuber, who the Taliban claimed was poisoned. Further investigation by Afghan journalists at the Zan Times found she had been tortured and beaten to death.

Amnesty International has noted an increase in child and forced marriages, as well as an uptick in gender-based and domestic violence against women. By dismantling the shelter and support networks across the country, the Taliban have put survivors at risk of further abuse under their strict interpretations of sharia law.

Mr. Bennett said that if the Taliban’s “crime against humanity” is not reversed, it will have reverberations down the generations and across borders. It should “shock the conscience of the world,” he writes. Many of us wonder why it hasn’t. How have we let this happen? And why are so many of our leaders so willfully powerless to do anything about it?

There’s an overwhelming feeling of helplessness among those of us who are still trying to help Afghan women. There are no more exits for the women still stuck in Afghanistan, and doors are closing to those who were able to leave to temporary homes. It’s particularly upsetting given that there are many Canadians who want to help, like Maureen – there are just no opportunities to do so. “I just wish we could do more,” she told me.

Kawsar and Somaia now have their whole lives ahead of them, and they know how fortunate they are to be likely among the last Afghan refugees to reach Canada under the government’s expedited program. “We are so excited!” Kawsar told me when I met her in Toronto in May, weeks after they arrived. “I can’t wait to start school!” She’s since joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets because her dream is to be an aerospace engineer.

But the road ahead will not be easy. Even as they explore their independence, they’re struggling with survivors’ guilt from leaving family behind. They worry about whether the Taliban might punish their family in retaliation. “Their sisters are back in Afghanistan unable to attend school, barely allowed to leave the house because of Taliban rule,” Maureen says about the young women she now calls “my girls.” “[They] could even be forced into marriage with Taliban soldiers at a young age.”

And there’s a new culture to adapt to, a new language, new norms. They will need to improve their English and study hard to make up for the disparity that exists between Afghanistan’s education system and Ontario’s. They are also still processing the trauma of three lost years.

That might be the hardest part about being a refugee: managing expectations, both their own, and those of their sponsors. The U.S. Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) recently canvassed Afghan refugees in Canada and the U.S. and found similar frustrations: a lack of support after the first year, difficulty finding jobs commensurate with their experience back home and culture shock.

One woman told SIGAR that her PhD credits were not transferable to Canadian institutions, and she now has to restart her education at a high-school level to work her way back up. Others say they plan to return to Afghanistan should the Taliban regime fall again. That might not be a bad thing; many Afghans who fled the first Taliban regime in the 1990s returned to help rebuild the country with the skills they learned in exile.

Kawsar and Somaia plan to stay in Canada, and while they will face the same challenges, their dreams at least have an opportunity to thrive. That’s thanks to the myriad helpers who achieved what now seems impossible: getting them to Canada.

But how many other dreams are now dashed? I would think it’s safe to say millions: Millions of Afghan women who once thought they could have what was promised to them, that they could be anything they wanted – even an aerospace engineer.

Still, they – and their supporters around the world – are not giving up. It’s due time, three years on, that the rest of us show that level of willpower, too.