Afghan women were blocked from attending high-level meetings between the Taliban, UN leaders and Afghan envoys in Qatar on Sunday after the Taliban demanded that the meetings be conditional on a ban on Afghan women.
“The diplomatic mission’s constant caving to terrorist demands only strengthens the Taliban’s views. Afghan women and girls live in open prisons and suffer subhuman treatment. Kidnapping, rape, torture and murder are an everyday reality for women under the Taliban’s gender segregated system,” Jason Hauck, executive director of Global Friends of Afghanistan, told Fox News Digital.
Discussions at the meeting reportedly focused on private sector growth, financing and banking regulation, and drug trafficking. According to the Associated PressTaliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid is leading a delegation of the de facto government to Afghanistan. Following their talks with the Taliban on Sunday, envoys are due to meet with Afghan women and members of civil society.
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Zabihullah Mujahid (center right), spokesman for the Taliban government leading the Taliban delegation, talks with Ismatullah Irgashev, special envoy of the Uzbek president to Afghanistan, during talks in Doha, Qatar, Sunday, June 30, 2024. The Taliban delegation is attending a UN-led conference on Afghanistan in Qatar after organizers said women would be excluded from the meeting. (Taliban Spokesperson’s Office via AP)
“The UN, diplomats and countries that support excluding women from the Doha talks to cater to the Taliban and the Haqqani terrorist network should be publicly shamed. Afghan women who believe in human rights for all must be present at every conference on the country’s future. Misogynist terrorists should not be allowed to participate in any conference until they change their stance on human rights and terrorism,” Hauck said.
UN spokesman Jose Luis Diaz assured Fox News Digital that “we, and many of our envoys, will be raising human rights, particularly the rights of women and girls, in all our discussions with the Taliban.” Diaz did not respond to a question about whether the delegation would specifically address the exhaustive list of Taliban repressive edicts, which include mandatory veiling, a ban on girls receiving education beyond the sixth grade and restrictions on women traveling unaccompanied by men.
US participants were expected to include Tom West, the US special representative for Afghanistan, and Lina Amiri, the US special envoy for Afghanistan women, girls, and human rights, according to State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. Miller told reporters that West and Amiri “committed to participating with clarity about the substantive agenda and, more importantly, with the assurance that the conference would have meaningful discussions with Afghan women and members of Afghan civil society.”
A Taliban spokesman speaks at a press conference in Kabul on June 29, 2024. Afghan Taliban officials met with international envoys in Qatar on June 30, in talks that the UN presented as a key step in the engagement process but which human rights groups criticized for marginalizing Afghan women. (Photo: AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
The Taliban were adamant that women’s issues would not be discussed in Doha. Speaking at a press conference in Kabul on Saturday, Voice of America Mujahid was reported to have reiterated that “the talks with Doha and other countries have nothing to do with the lives of our sisters and we will not allow them to interfere in our internal affairs.” While Mujahid acknowledged that “women face problems,” he noted that “this is an internal Afghan issue that needs to be dealt with locally within the framework of Islamic law.”
in Interview posted on XRoza Otunbayeva, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), hinted at how women’s issues might be addressed. “The issues of private industry, the issues of banking, the counter-narcotics policy, these are all women’s issues,” she told reporters.
UNAMA did not respond to questions about Otunbayeva’s remarks or the scope of its talks with the Taliban on women’s rights.
Afghan women chant protest slogans and hold placards during a demonstration in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on March 26, 2022. (Associated Press)
Afghan women have been subject to physical attacks in public for allegedly illegal activities since Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada imposed Sharia law across the country in November 2022. On June 4, 14 women were publicly flogginged in Sar-e-Pur province for crimes including immoral relations, theft and sexual intercourse.
Some of the worst attacks against women have happened in private settings. In its 2023 human rights report, the State Department documented allegations of women being raped in Taliban prisons. Some women were reportedly forced to have abortions after becoming pregnant while in custody. Others were executed after “making themselves seriously ill as a result of repeated sexual assaults by Taliban members.”
Suhail Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s Doha political office, told Fox News Digital that Western media reports on women’s issues “do not reflect the reality in Afghanistan,” explaining that “girls can receive education at medical centers and other Darul Uloom institutions across the country.” Shaheen did not respond to follow-up questions about how many girls receive such education or how they are expected to qualify for higher education in the future if their schooling ends in the sixth grade.
Shaheen also said reports of rape in prisons are “mere allegations and accusations.” The people behind such accusations are: [Afghan women’s] It is a place of asylum for Western countries. I hope that those who have control over the real situation in Western countries will not be misled by biased media.”
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On December 28, 2021, in Kabul, Afghanistan, members of a Taliban force fired shots into the air to disperse Afghan women during a rally protesting Taliban restrictions on women. (Reuters/Ali Kara)
Journalist Lynn O’Donnell, a former Kabul bureau chief for the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, wrote for the Spectator about an investigation into the rape of imprisoned Afghan women by members of the Taliban. She told Fox News Digital, “I wrote an article with credible allegations that were investigated by the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan and referenced by the State Department…So let’s just say it’s a story I made up, it reflects Western propaganda, it’s just more Taliban propaganda. It’s nonsensical.”
In 2022, O’Donnell was detained and interrogated by the Taliban while traveling to Afghanistan to report on the country’s changes following the Taliban’s occupation of the country. The Taliban forced O’Donnell to publicly retract previous reporting about Taliban crimes, including allegations that O’Donnell forced women into marriage before being allowed to leave the country.
O’Donnell also claimed, “The UN, the US, the EU, the UK and the entire international community are in cahoots with the Taliban, as they have always done. Their reaction to my reporting is proof they are willing to collude with a terrorist group that is murderers, drug traffickers, widow-makers, child killers, liars and misogynists.”
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, told Fox News Digital that UN officials in Doha should not underestimate their negotiating counterparts. “The Taliban leadership outmaneuvered the US in negotiations, organized to drive the US out of Afghanistan, and seized control of the country before the US withdrew,” Roggio said, calling it proof the group is “organized, unified and sophisticated.”
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Taliban fighters hold up their weapons in front of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, August 15, as they celebrate one year since taking control of the Afghan capital. (AP/Ebrahim Norouj)
Otunbayeva told reporters that the Taliban “came from the battlefield, from the mountains,” and that she “immediately called them… [and] accept [is] “It’s not easy,” Otunbayeva said in a meeting with the de facto cabinet, adding that some Taliban members have said they support education opportunities for girls and that the ban came from higher up.
Roggio said Otunbayeva “is falling into the trap of many of the Taliban’s apologists: she is repeating the same talking points the Taliban has made behind closed doors and presenting herself as a moderate Taliban that will empower women. The Taliban is united on the issue of women’s oppression and I challenge her to name a leading leader who opposes this.”
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The Taliban were not invited to the first Doha summit, to be held in May 2023. They refused to take part in the second conference in February after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it had presented conditions that “deny them the right to consult with other representatives of Afghan society and demand treatment that is largely akin to recognition.”
Secretary-General’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said: He told reporters last week “The meetings between UN officials and the special envoy should in no way be seen as an official recognition or legitimacy of the Taliban as a government.”
