Afghan women in fear as Taliban go door to door in search of those who worked for ‘enemies’
Many of the women of Afghanistan are frightened right now. And those who worked for the foreigners who’ve pulled out of the country, are even more so.
They are some of the top Taliban targets and too many of them are telling us how the Taliban are going from door to door, trying to find those who once worked for the “enemies”.
Officially, there’s an amnesty. Unofficially, there are scores being settled and intimidation is rife.
There are many more people out in the market than we’ve seen in the previous few days
“Why did I work for the US?” one 24-year-old woman asks us.
“That [when we are in] such a situation they are not responding us (sic)… not hearing us? It’s a waste of my work experience, all those years. It’s a waste of effort, it’s a waste of struggle, it’s a waste of everything right now. I even carry some kind of hate in my heart for them.”
She and her sister have travelled with their uncle to where we are staying. They were too scared to talk to us openly.
They saw us filming in a market in the capital and the younger sister (who we will call “Tabasum” for her safety), tells us she watched us for two hours before summoning up the courage to pull Sky producer Chris Cunningham to one side.
“Please, I want you to interview me,” she told him. “I can’t talk here because our lives are in danger.”
Speaking to women at the market
It has taken tremendous bravery to speak up at all. We are just a few metres away from an armed Taliban checkpoint. The fighters who are patrolling through the market, with weapons slung over their shoulders, tell us how we are seeing a different, better side of Kabul.
“A few weeks ago you would not have been able to come here because of the security,” the Talib tells us. There appears to be no irony in his voice.
There are many more people out in the market than we’ve seen in the previous few days. And there is a marked increase in the number of women in public.
Initially, the Taliban instructed women to stay indoors “for security reasons”. But while we are here there are many thronging the stalls.
Talibs at the market checkpoint
We notice they are all wearing long flowing dresses or coats and headscarves or hijabs – a number are in the all-enveloping burka. Many appear to have a male companion (mahram) shepherding the groups of females around.
We ask the Taliban commander manning the checkpoint what he does to enforce any dress code. He replies that so long as the women adhere to Sharia law, there’s no issue.
Another Talib interrupts. “It’s an Islamic society,” he says. “And there is no need to tell them to wear hijab, we haven’t had to ask them…everyone is obeying that now.”
When you’re the ones holding the guns, perhaps you don’t need to persuade too hard.
Initially, the Taliban instructed women to stay indoors ‘for security reasons’
In the room where we are secretly meeting the young women, they spread out their paperwork which shows extensive links with USAID and other foreign aid groups like CARE, which has a base in Britain.
There are 25 members of their extended family with eight of them children. Almost all of the adults used to work for foreign aid groups or they are female teachers, now in danger.
The young women’s mother is a principal at a girls’ high school.
Street children at the Taliban checkpoint
“Look at this death threat she received from the Taliban,” Murro shows us. She flicks through her phone to find the scrawled letter from the Taliban which was investigated and verified by the previous administration.
The letter says: “Our main aim and work is to kill all students, teachers and the principal.”
They talk about their mother opening the door to their home a few days after Kabul fell to the Islamist group to find a gaggle of armed Taliban outside.
“They just demanded food and came in,” Tabasum says. “I was standing in my bedroom just shaking. I could not believe it.”
Tabasum (not her real name) speaking to Sky’s Alex Crawford
The Taliban fighters began to regularly march into the house demanding food, or tea and asking questions about who they worked for.
“Did you work for the old government,” one Talib asked them. “There are rumours you worked for the foreigners…”
“We decided we needed to move then,” Tabasum says. They’ve been on the run ever since.
They show us photographs with the former US first lady Laura Bush taken in Washington DC. There are others standing proudly with British soldiers.
“We love our country. We were proud to work for Afghanistan and build a new future,” says 24-year-old Murro. “I empowered 900 women during my career with USAID. Now what am I? I am not empowered. I am told I cannot work and I’m told how to dress.
“I worry about the future, not just my future but my family’s future and the country’s future. Have you ever felt you are living in a country that is not your country anymore? That’s how I feel right now.”
Tabasum (not her real name) has spoken out about her experiences
They tell us of how the friends and partners they worked with for years have now turned their backs on them. How none of their emails and applications for asylum are being answered or even responded to.
WhatsApps go unread, calls are not picked up.
Tabasum was one day away from finishing her business degree. She was due to complete her thesis at one of Kabul’s top universities on Monday.
The airport suicide bombing which killed nearly two hundred including 13 US service personnel happened on the Sunday before.
“In one day, my life changed. All the lecturers left the country. The university is now empty. All four years of my studying is wasted.”
She had a job but her superiors rang her up and told her it wasn’t safe for her to come in as a woman and that she should stay at home. Almost half the staff were women, now all sitting at home.
“They don’t want me because I’m a girl,” Tabasum says. “I don’t have the right to come out of my home now without a male. Why? Because this is an inequality. I don’t have the same rights as a boy. I am nothing for them.”
“I have become invisible. I used to have a job. I am educated. I don’t need any man. But now I am just nothing.”
The Taliban has made reassurances that it respects women’s rights
She’s wearing a full-length coat and black hijab. “Before I never wore a hijab,” she says. “I wore T-shirt and jeans. Now I can’t go anywhere without covering my head and wearing these clothes.”
Despite all the reassurances from the Taliban that they respect women’s rights, the women of Afghanistan do not believe them.
And the Taliban are dealing with a tougher, better educated, more liberal Afghan woman now – many of them in their 20s or 30s.
The Taliban checkpoint at night
They have aspirations and educated minds which has put fire in their stomachs and sent courage soaring through their veins. We’ve seen them take to the streets to fight for their rights – and not back down even when staring down the barrel of a gun.
The Taliban fighters may be manning the checkpoints and prowling the area with guns but the Afghan women are not prepared to return to the times their mothers endured.
We set out to meet a female activist and mother of three who we interviewed before the Taliban took control. We will call her “Fatima”.
She also worked for a series of foreign NGO’s focused on running female empowerment courses and skill projects for women.
Colourful clothes are on sale at markets
She too received written death threats from the Taliban as well as threatening texts and frightening phone calls.
She told us weeks before the Taliban marched into the capital that she was in fear of her life and was terrified her three young children were going to be harmed as the Taliban had warned of killing her whole family.
She’d taken refuge in a women’s shelter then. Since then even that’s not safe. The Taliban have moved in and she’s moving constantly now with her family from friends’ home to friends’ home.
She was cleared to be evacuated by the British military and received a confirmation email but hours later got another warning her not to travel to the airport or the Baron Hotel because of a precise security threat which turned out to be the suicide bomber who blew himself up the following day.
Taliban checkpoint
Since then she’s been getting increasingly desperate as evacuation flights have been halted.
Those left behind who did so much service for Afghanistan and worked with such faith with the foreign partners, they never expected to leave so hurriedly, are feeling forgotten and in many ways betrayed.
“I prefer to die at sea at the hands of human traffickers trying to escape here than be killed by the Taliban,” Fatima tells us. “But I’m a prisoner here right now.”
World
Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
‘They should have been protected’
Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID
Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.
Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.
He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?
Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off
These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.
China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP
That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.
Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.
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