What Have Five Years of Taliban Rule Done to Women Who Worked for the Former Government?

AI-generated / Zan TV

What Have Five Years of Taliban Rule Done to Women Who Worked for the Former Government?

Night is not a time of rest for Koubra. When darkness falls over the house, one question does not leave her mind:

If she cannot find work tomorrow, where will the family’s food come from?

She once worked at the Kabul police headquarters and earned a monthly salary of 13,500 afghanis. It was not a large income, but in her words, “we could get by”. She covered part of the family’s expenses and at least knew that at the end of each month, there would be some money to keep the household running.

Five years after the fall of the republic, that income no longer exists. Koubra now works in people’s homes. She washes clothes, cleans houses and does whatever work she can to earn money. But sometimes she cannot find any work at all, and her family’s table remains empty.

Koubra, 41, told Zan News: “Even during the republic, I took a government job because of financial hardship. The 13,500 afghanis I earned was helpful and enough for us to get by.”

She says that after the Taliban returned, she had no hope of returning to a government job.

“When the Taliban came, they considered not only women but also men from the former system to be infidels and saw them as Americans. So there was no chance they would give me a job. In short, we are in a very difficult financial situation.”

What Koubra first lost was a job, but over time, the consequences of unemployment have reached every part of her life.

She speaks of nights when hunger did not allow members of her family to sleep.

“Many times we have gone to sleep hungry at night until morning. We woke up a hundred times because of hunger. I could not sleep because I was so hungry, but what can we do?”

Koubra does not pause to explain further. She simply repeats the final sentence: “But what can we do?”

Working in people’s homes has now become part of her daily life, work that she sometimes does for very little money.

“There have been days when I washed people’s clothes just for a piece of dry bread.”

But for Koubra, poverty is not only about having no money. She says she is sometimes also humiliated while working in other people’s homes.

“The people whose houses I clean make sarcastic remarks at me and mock me.”

A woman who once had a fixed salary in a government office now depends on work that provides neither a stable income nor any certainty that she will find work the next day.

Koubra’s story is repeated in Balkh.

Sajida, a former employee of one of the government departments under the republic, lost her job after the Taliban returned and now works in a tailoring workshop.

She says that when she worked for the government, life was simple, but she had a regular income.

“There was a time when we were government employees, and things were good. We earned an income, and it covered the family’s expenses.”

Now Sajida’s income depends on how many customers come into the workshop.

“As you can see my life now, sometimes I sew and there are customers. Sometimes I simply spend the whole day here until evening and go home empty-handed at night.”

She does not receive a fixed salary and works on a percentage basis.

“I work on a percentage basis in this workshop. For every 100 afghanis, they give me 20 afghanis.”

For Sajida, who considers herself the breadwinner of her family, not having a stable job means facing the same question every day: will she have any money to take home today?

Criticising the Taliban’s policies towards women, she says: “The Taliban see women as slaves and as a means of sexual satisfaction. They think women should only stay at home.”

She then raises a question that has no simple answer for many women who support their families:

“What should a woman like me do if she is the breadwinner and has no money? Where should she find food? How should she feed her children?”

This question does not belong only to Koubra and Sajida.

Arezoo, 43, a resident of Ghazni, was also a government employee under the republic. She now speaks about the difficulty of covering daily living costs and her own medical expenses.

For Arezoo, five years of Taliban rule have not simply meant a political change. She says the change has directly made people’s daily lives more difficult.

“The Taliban have been in power for five years, but they have turned life into hell for people and pushed the country back by 50 years.”

Without a stable income, expenses that were once manageable have become heavier for her, from everyday household costs to medical treatment.

For Koubra, the past five years have included nights when she sometimes went to bed hungry. For Sajida, they have included days spent in the workshop without customers, ending with her returning home empty-handed. For Arezoo, they have brought worries about living costs and medical expenses.

The accounts of these three women show that for women who contributed to their families’ expenses, losing a job did not only mean losing a salary. The consequences have reached the family table, healthcare, economic security and their daily lives.

The question raised by Sajida remains at the end: if a woman is the breadwinner of her family but has neither permission nor an opportunity to work, where is she supposed to find the money to support her children?