Trapped in Kabul, prominent Afghan women fear retaliation under Taliban rule

She broke her SIM card, packed the light and hid.

“They have promised to kill me,” said Nabila, who quoted by her first name. “My husband and I now change our house every four days.”

He said about 200 other female Afghan lawyers and judges, unemployed and vulnerable to Taliban retaliation, are trapped in Kabul with them.

President Biden described last month’s two-week airlift from Afghanistan as an “extraordinary success” that evacuated nearly 120,000 people. Rule of law, stay stuck.

Women like Nabila are most at risk because of their past roles and the Taliban’s harsh new restrictions on women’s rights.

They face an additional, and often insurmountable, obstacle to leaving Afghanistan: the lack of any official government ID, let alone a passport.

According to the World Bank, about 52% of Afghan women do not have a national ID, known as a tazkira, compared to only 6% of Afghan men. This discrepancy is largely due to conservative cultural norms, which prohibit Afghan women from going to government office to obtain identity cards, or keeping them at home where they rarely need it. The US typically requires tazkira or passports from Afghans airlifted from Kabul, and ID is required to process visa applications.

“We are talking about the most highly educated Afghan women who do not have documents,” said Kimberly Motley, an international human rights lawyer who has worked on Afghan issues for more than a decade.

“We are completely obliged to legal professionals who were part of these programs. We sold them the idea that the rule of law is the foundation of building a ‘democratic and civilized’ society,” said Ms. Motley.

Nabila, who served for six years as a judge in Afghanistan’s Family Court, only applied for an electronic ID card, a precondition for a passport, 10 days before Kabul fell. He had not achieved this before the Taliban took control of the state bureaucracy.

Nabeela and her allies are far from the only prominent Afghan women trapped. An employee of Women for Afghan Women, a grassroots civil-society organization that promotes and protects the rights of underprivileged women, said she and 43 aides were in hiding since the Taliban went into their offices. The day Kabul had fallen. He said that no employee is able to leave the country. Most do not have a passport.

Even for women who had the right papers, getting on an evacuation flight was often not an option. Without the ability to line up for hours or days at a male-dominated scrum outside Kabul airport, and fearful of passing through checkpoints manned by Taliban fighters, possibly looking for them, many women in key legal, cultural and political positions Evacuation flights departed in late August as the last American was seen.

Since then, four chartered Qatari flights have departed from Kabul, carrying about 680 Americans, other foreign passport holders and their dependents. Afghans without permanent residence abroad were not allowed to board.

The August airlift included several daring, successful escapes, freeing the Afghanistan women’s national football team and thousands of Afghans through a two-week rescue operation run by a group of American volunteers.

There are still many more remaining, including 34 female volleyball players and staff for the women’s adult and youth national teams. The Taliban have indicated they will ban women’s participation in the Games. One of the players said, “We have no clear future after years of fighting against the odds to find a place in our beloved sport. I haven’t been out of the house since the Taliban took power. It’s very difficult.” “

Two hundred and eighty students, staff and teachers of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, including girls, failed to eject after an evacuation attempt 100 yards from the airport in the final days of the US airlift.

The institution regularly received threats from the Taliban and was hit by a suicide bombing during a concert in 2014 that killed a German citizen.

“Musical diversity, western music, girls and boys in music, music for social change,” said Ahmed Sarmast, founder and director of the institute, which had Afghanistan’s first female orchestra, the Zohra and received funding from the US embassy for years. . “Everything we did was against the ideology of the Taliban,” said Mr. Sarmast, who partially lost his hearing as a result of the 2014 bombings.

One of the most significant gains for women’s rights since 2001 is the ability for women to seek protection from divorce and abusive husbands. Judge Nabila said the Taliban’s victory over Afghanistan had already put the lives of women who had benefited from family law and women’s courts since 2001.

Nabila was trained as part of the Justice Sector Assistance Program, which was funded with more than $200 million of the total US taxpayers’ $1 billion spent on promoting the rule of law in Afghanistan . She said meeting the Wall Street Journal for an interview in central Kabul was the first time she had come to the city from the suburbs where she worked every day. She dressed in black covering her face, traveling with her husband to avoid anger from the Taliban, who say women should not be left home alone.

A few years ago, Nabila was part of a three-person court that divorced a woman in Kabul whose husband was in prison for killing her.

On the day of the verdict, the husband managed to slip around a line of police officers outside the courtroom. Enraged by the decision of Nabila and his associates, he approached his now ex-wife and stabbed her 14 times with a knife hidden in his shoe, Nabila recalled. The woman died from the wound.

When the Taliban broke open prisons across the country in August, the man was among thousands of freed prisoners, and one of whose wrath he now fears.

“We have been forgotten. We worked on human rights, divorce, gender-based violence. I want to continue this work, but first I have to save myself,” Nabila said.

—Zameer Saar contributed to this article.