RASC News Agency: On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power, the Afghanistani Powerful Women’s Movement has declared August 15 a “dark and agonizing scar” upon the collective memory of the Afghanistani people a date symbolizing the descent into one of the most repressive and turbulent eras of the nation’s modern history. In its latest statement, the movement recalls how, on August 15 four years ago, the Taliban stormed into power by brute force devoid of any political, legal, or popular legitimacy. From that day forward, the group unleashed a calculated and merciless campaign to erase women from every sphere of public life, suffocate individual liberties, and impose sweeping social restrictions that have dragged Afghanistan into “one of the most lightless chapters in its history.”
Over these four years, millions of girls have been banned from education; women have been stripped of the right to work, travel, or participate in public life; and the media has been gagged under suffocating censorship. Civil activists have been driven into silence through fear or forced into exile. Ethnic and religious minorities face systemic persecution, while crushing poverty and economic collapse have left the majority of the population in survival mode, trapped between hunger and hopelessness. Yet, the statement affirms that “the struggle against Taliban repression and violence will not cease until the dawn of freedom and the triumph of justice.”
The anniversary arrives amid mounting reports of intensified Taliban intrusions into the personal lives of women. In the past month alone, the regime’s morality police and intelligence units have conducted aggressive home raids in Kabul and other cities. Witnesses report that women’s private possessions from cosmetics to personal items have been smashed or set ablaze, with some women arrested simply for “possessing such objects.” Analysts view this escalation as part of the Taliban’s master plan: the total erasure of women’s identity and existence from public and social life, now expanded to policing the most intimate aspects of their private lives.
The protesting women have declared August 15 not as a day of despair, but as a Day of Defiance and Justice-Seeking. In their words, the Taliban are “an unlawful, misogynistic, and fundamentally abusive regime” a political entity that thrives on fear, sustains itself through violence, and survives only by extinguishing the rights of half the population. They have called upon the international community to reject any form of recognition and to provide urgent and sustained protection for women, journalists, human rights defenders, and other vulnerable groups. In Bamiyan Province, a discreet indoor gathering of girls barred from education recounted the last four years as a time of deprivation, fear, and emotional exile. Yet, they declared that their voices would not be muted and their fight for a free, equal, and just future would not be abandoned.
Human rights advocates warn that the Taliban are rapidly reverting to the worst version of their 1990s blueprint. Their anti-women policies are not fading with time; they are metastasizing reaching deeper into private life, hollowing out freedoms from the inside. Without coordinated and unrelenting international pressure, they caution, Afghanistan will tumble into an irreversible abyss: a fractured society where women’s freedoms, human dignity, and the very foundations of civil coexistence will be annihilated. This is no government in the service of its people. It is a regime that has turned oppression into policy, violence into governance, and the denial of women’s humanity into its defining creed.
