Desperate Afghan women are taking their own lives because of mental health issues, lack of opportunities and shrinking space for them in public life, said the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), adding that the new Islamist regime under the Taliban is enforcing "progressive exclusion" of women from all walks of life. 

But is anyone listening?

"Every day there is at least one or two women who commit suicide for the lack of opportunity, for the mental health, for the pressure they receive," Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan women rights activist, said during an urgent debate held on Friday by the members of the Human Rights Council.   

Koofi, a former deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament, added: "The fact that girls as young as nine years old are being sold, not only because of economic pressure but because of the fact that there is no hope for them, for their family, it is not normal."

Curbs on women

After coming to power in August 2022, the Taliban has enforced a series of measures restricting the freedom and rights of women and girls. Since last year, hundreds of women were fired from their jobs, over 1.2 million senior secondary-level girls remain out of school, and women have been ordered not to venture out in public without a male guardian. 

"I am so hopeless for the future, and it's not getting better, and the Taliban will never change…. You can't dream in the presence of the Taliban," Farzana, a 15-year-old Afghan girl, told Human Rights Watch (HRW).

According to UN Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet, hundreds of businesses operated by Afghan women have been closed since the Taliban's return to power.

"Yet despite these assurances, we are witnessing the progressive exclusion of women and girls from the public sphere and their institutionalised, systematic oppression," she said, adding that beyond right, women's participation in the economy was indispensable, which also requires their access to education and rights to work. 

Taliban won't change

Despite public statements by a few senior Taliban leaders supporting girls' education, there has been little indication of any progress. The group's core leadership, dominated by hardline clerics, seems bent on pushing through gender discriminatory policies.

The recent statement by the Taliban Supreme Leader Mawlawi Haibitullah Akhundzada at a grand tribal jirga held in Kabul this week indicated "no compromise".

"There will be no compromise on rules prescribed by the Sharia. The world should not interfere in Afghanistan, which is sovereign and independent. We will not accept orders from anyone," declared the Taliban leader. 

But the world seems to have put Afghanistan on the back burner of pressing issues, and there seems to be little light at the end of the tunnel for millions of Afghan women.

(The author is Research Associate, Society for Policy Studies. Views are personal)