KABUL. The Taliban entered Kabul in the August summer heat and find themselves ruling it in the snowiest winter in recent years. Five months after the hasty escape of the Americans, in the capital surrounded by white mountains, life continues among slippery roads, pomegranates for sale, and the unexpected consequences of a return to the rules of the past.
By jumping over the obstacles of the hand-shoveled snow, you reach a shop where the best-selling product is not burqas, but a lice shampoo. After years of fighting, and with families in rural villages, most of the Taliban saw the lights of the capital for the first time only at the moment of its conquest five months ago. “Many of them, coming from the countryside and having long beards, also brought parasites with them when the city was taken,” he tells The print the owner of a shop in Kabul, with satisfaction showing the highly demanded cream with comb, which was sold out. Sales of beard growing products have also increased. For some products, however, the ban has taken place: away with fake beards. But also photos of breastfeeding items where breasts and pillows for pregnant women are visible: the girl in the photo is not sufficiently covered. For online sales, the trader is now forced to use a model covered with the traditional burqa with a mesh visor, which has become the best-known symbol of the Taliban regime.
After the initial surge in sales, many of the burqas remained in the boxes. Few orders in the second online store in the country, “because the women saw that it was not imposed as it had in the past,” says the owner.
However, female discrimination is palpable in every corner of the city. Beauty salons have images of women obscured, and they remain empty. Teachers, government officials, lawyers interviewed by La Stampa are at home, often after a career already won against the wishes of the men of the family.
And often contributing to the ruin of the family budget. The result can be heard in the living room of red carpets and low cushions of the house of Fawzia Arafi, teacher and activist. The 58-year-old finds herself not teaching for the first time in her 40-year career. “I was teaching girls math. For the first quarter of an hour I explained to them issues related to their life, period, marriage. Then, we moved on to preparing the test for the final exams, ”explains Fawzia. “Afghan girls have a great desire to learn. In the villages they want to become teachers, because it is also a way to be independent from their families. In the cities they had the ambition to become doctors, lawyers. Now these dreams are gone, ”says the teacher shaking his head covered by a gray scarf.
Poverty and lack of food caused by drought, Covid and the freezing of international aid is also forcefully printed on the faces of those who approach to ask for money and help. Afghanistan, with a population of around 39 million and temperatures well below freezing overnight, had already suffered an economic contraction in 2020, but the international community’s decision to isolate the country and the depreciation of the currency local materialize in an increasingly visible way.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has estimated the first week of January that more than half of the population will suffer from lack of access to sufficient amounts of nutrition. More than a quarter of the population – nearly nine million people – are even at risk of famine. In Kabul the markets still sell fruit, bread similar to our focaccia is found and butchers hang up the meat, cafes and restaurants are open. But not everyone can afford to buy food – not even the Taliban, and most of the country lives on subsistence agriculture, as reported by FAO’s annual assessments: food is sufficient to feed only individual families and therefore extremely vulnerable. to the increasingly irregular alternation of droughts and floods.
At the UN distribution point, queues take hours. There are above all men, to be able to push the wheelbarrows who, when the turn comes after the complex recognition procedure including fingerprints, will be filled with a heavy sack of flour, salt, oil and beans. It has to last a month, no matter how big the household is. “Now we see more and more people who were formerly part of the middle class, such as those who worked in the government,” a UN spokesman tells us.
The offices of the Foreign Ministry, for example, have many empty chairs – those of female officials – and even those who work, after all, often do so without receiving a salary for months.
“Things were getting better,” says teacher Fawzia. “Now it will go back 40 years. We absolutely need help ”.
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