TIMECODE

DIALOGUE

00:00:00

This program contains material that may be distressing to some viewers.

00:00:10

KARISHMA VYAS:  It was supposed to be a new dawn for Afghan women…

After years of being terrorised by the Taliban….they celebrated when the US overthrew the brutal regime….

00:00:28

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: “We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

00:00:36

KARISHMA VYAS: But after 18 years and tens of thousands of casualties...the war rages on….

And the Taliban insurgency is stronger than ever....

00:00:48

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “The American people are weary of war without victory.”

00:00:55

KARISHMA VYAS: Desperate to withdraw its troops...the US is now negotiating a peace deal that could see the group return to power… along with its violent repression of women.

00:01:09

LAILA HAIDARI: “As the people who have signed the death sentence of many women, I have no expectations of the Taliban.”

00:01:17

KARISHMA VYAS: 101 East investigates if Afghan women will pay the price for peace in their war-torn country.

00:01:27

101 EAST LOGO

00:01:31

THE WAR ON AFGHAN WOMAN – A film by Karishma Vyas

00:01:57

LAILA HAIDARI: Stop talking crap! Stop talking crap! (Cop) - Don’t film. (Laila) Do you think they’re filming you? You’re going to get kidnapped tomorrow!”

00:01:58

KARISHMA VYAS: Driving with Laila Haidari through Kabul’s traffic can be stressful…

Mostly for other motorists…

00:02:13

LAILA HAIDARI: “Damn your father, you dog.”

00:02:17

KARISHMA VYAS: Her methods aren’t exactly legal…. but then …. this is a war zone.

00:02:23

LAILA HAIDARI: “Nobody has a license. I don’t even have a license.”

-“(L) Police! Police! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

00:02:42

KARISHMA VYAS: Out on these congested roads, Laila never fails to cause a scene.

It might be the cursing…

00:02:51

LAILA HAIDARI: “What an idiot! ”

00:02:53

KARISHMA VYAS: Or it might be that you rarely see a woman driving here ... especially one without a head scarf.

00:02:59

VYAS: “How do people react when they see you driving?”

HAIDARI: “They curse at you, tell you you’re a whore. It’s very upsetting because all you’re doing is driving.”

00:03:16

KARISHMA VYAS: But when it comes to a fight… Laila is not one to back down.

To her…. driving isn’t just a convenience….

In Afghanistan, it’s an act of defiance.

00:03:28

LAILA HAIDARI: “It’s a jungle here, a jungle. If you live with wolves, you’ll become a wolf.  Since I’m living with people who don’t follow the law, I’ll do the same.”

00:03:37

KARISHMA VYAS: But it’s not just these streets that have made Laila tough.

For 10 years, she has worked on the frontlines of an epidemic that few are bold enough to take on….

00:03:49

VYAS PTC: “We’re driving around looking for drug addicts on the streets of Kabul so that Laila can take them back to her rehab center. It’s pretty dangerous work but she does it all the time.”

00:04:07

KARISHMA VYAS: -“There’s a little crowd of drug addicts here.”

HAIDARI: “Who wants to get treatment? I can take you to rehab. (addict shaking head) No, we’re not going.”

00:04:26

VYAS: Under a bridge in broad daylight, we spot dozens of users.

00:04:35

HAIDARI: -“Below it’s really dangerous. So I’ll go and you film from here.”

VYAS: “OK”

00:04:52

HAIDARI: Boys, we take sick people to rehab. Who wants to go?”

“(addict) What kind of sick people? (L) Sick people like you.”

00:05:05

KARISHMA VYAS: One of the men sees us filming and starts throwing rocks… but Laila pushes on.

00:05:17

HAIDARI: “What’s happening? Look at the conditions here. Oh my God.”

00:05:22

KARISHMA VYAS: Suddenly…she spots a young man she’s already treated... several times.

00:05:27

HAIDARI: “Keep using, keeping using until…Get lost! You’re never going to become a real person.”

00:05:38

KARISHMA VYAS: This work is not for the meek…

But in Afghanistan, a woman doing this job is so offensive to some that people have attempted to kill her…

She had to fight off two men who broke into her home and tried to strangle her in her sleep.

Another time, she was attacked in what she thought was a taxi.

00:06:01

HAIDARI: “The people in the back pulled the scarf around my neck and strangled me. I thought I was finished.”

-“The driver took a weapon from the glove compartment and said, ‘If you don’t stop your work, it’s this easy for us to kill you’.”

00:06:17

KARISHMA VYAS: But Laila didn’t stop. In fact…she doubled down.

00:06:22

HAIDARI: -“Society expects me to stay at home, have children, be a good host, and no man should hear my voice. I have just one life and I don’t want to live the way society wants.”

00:06:41

KARISHMA VYAS: It’s a choice she wouldn’t have had 18 years ago when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Under its regime, women were not seen or heard…

They were forced to wear the burqa, and were banned from schools and jobs.

And if they broke these rules…. they were flogged and sometimes executed.

00:07:04

HAIDARI: “We’ve gambled with our lives, minute by minute. Why? Because we want women to have a place in society.”

00:07:18

KARISHMA VYAS: To show me how much things have changed …. Laila and her friends take me to a place so taboo... it was completely banned by the Taliban...

It’s… a bowling alley. Not exactly the hotbed of vice I was expecting.

But not that long ago… all of us would’ve been publicly flogged just for being here.

00:07:45

VYAS: “Could you do something like this 18 years ago in Kabul?”

“(Soha) We didn’t dare. We couldn’t go out the way we can now.”

“(Soha) The way we dress has changed. Back then we couldn’t go out like this.”

00:08:00

KARISHMA VYAS: And, they tell me, that’s not the only change…

00:08:06

SOUND UP: “(Samira) Women’s participation in society, in government and non-government offices has increased. Women are going to colleges, they’re in business. They work, they’re independent.”

00:08:21

KARISHMA VYAS: But now women fear that these freedoms may not last for much longer.

Rumors are rife that the Taliban could come back into government as part of a deal negotiated with the US.

00:08:35

VYAS: “What would the Taliban think of you guys, Laila?.... (HAIDARI ) If they captured us, they’d kill us. They’d say, ‘Look at the way they look. Look at what they do in society’.”

00:08:47

HAIDARI:“As an Afghan, I’m shocked. The Americans introduced democracy, human rights, women’s rights to us, and encouraged us to defend them. But they’re telling us that now the Taliban is legit? How has the Taliban changed. Was all this talk of human rights, women’s rights, democracy – was it just a game?”

00:09:10

VYAS: Laila is not the only one outraged by these peace talks.

Under the hashtag My Red Line, women are taking to social media to defend their rights.

00:09:21

HAIDARI: “As a woman, my red line is to be able to drive under any circumstances.”

00:09:28

SOUND-UP: -“I am a journalist. I will be a journalist. My red line is my pen and my freedom of expression.”

00:09:36

VYAS: There are athletes, musicians, mothers…all coming together to make it clear that their freedom isn’t up for negotiation.

00:09:45

VYAS: But in a country so scarred by war …. are women’s rights a luxury that only urban, affluent Afghans can afford to care about?

00:09:53

SOUND-UP: “Gender equality is my red line.”

00:09:58

To find out …I head to the northern province of Balkh.

00:10:03

SOUND-UP: -“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mazar-e-Sharif. The local time here is 11:50 in the morning.”

00:10:13

VYAS: Mazar-e-sharif is a much smaller…. much more conservative city than Kabul.

There are definitely no bowling alleys here.  And in public at least…many women still wear the burqa.

I’m here to meet lawyer Najia Sadiq….

But catching her isn’t easy.

00:10:51

SOUND-UP: “Ms Gulalai, this case has been closed. I’ve just brought it to you so you can do the mediation work.”

00:11:00

KV: Right now she’s juggling 17 cases…. defending women who have fled abusive families and forced marriages.

00:11:09

NAJIA SADIQ: “If I talk, will you listen? Will you listen calmly? Will you not shout? If you don’t trust or love each other, if the marriage is forced, then you don’t have a future. Understand this.”

00:11:22

VYAS: Najia works for an NGO called Women for Afghan Women … which runs secret shelters.

00:11:33

SADIQ: “Most of the cases we have are connected to domestic violence and family issues. Women want the relatives who have abused them to be punished.”

00:11:45

VYAS: Many here fear for their lives.

For their protection, we’ve changed their names.

00:11:51

FATIMA: “I’ve been married for 12 years. I stayed for the sake of my kids, for the sake of my life.”

00:11:57

VYAS: Today, Najia is meeting with her client ‘Fatima’ and her husband…

‘Fatima’ says her husband is violent, and that his uncle sexually harasses her … accusations he denies.

00:12:09

FATIMA: ”I’m not a dog, I’m a person. I can tolerate this for one day, two days, three days.

(husband) - She’s never gone hungry.

SADIQ: Speak when it’s your turn.”

00:12:23

VYAS: ‘Fatima’ has tried to leave him before….

00:12:26

FATIMA: “His mother let slip that if I didn’t return that morning, he was going to take lorry full of men to my sister’s house and rape her, her son and her daughter-in-law. I’m not going back anymore. My dead body might go back, but not while I’m alive.”

00:12:46

VYAS: Despite Najia’s best efforts...this meeting is going nowhere…

00:12:52

FATIMA: “You want to take me to prison? I’m ready!

 SADIQ: No one’s going to prison right now.”

(husband) - I’m not going to leave you. Men rule over women. Women don’t rule men.”

SADIQ: “Thank you, listen. Don’t say men rule women and women don’t rule men.

(Husband) I’m just giving you an example.

SADIQ: OK, look. You have your rights and responsibilities... and she has her rights and responsibilities.”

00:13:18

KARISHMA VYAS: ‘Fatima’s’ husband says he will never agree to a separation. She’ll have to take him to court.

00:13:26

FATIMA: “For three months last winter his damn uncle slept in the same room as me.”

SADIQ:“Don’t worry, we can press charges against his uncle too if you want.”

00:13:36

KARISHMA VYAS: But it’s her three children that ‘Fatima’ is worried about.

Under Afghan law, she’ll lose custody if she leaves.

00:13:46

SADIQ: “OK, don’t cry. It’s not the solution. I want to separate. It’s better to die once than to die every day.”

00:13:59

KARISHMA VYAS: Najia knows her client is in a desperate situation.  She also knows it could be much worse.

00:14:08

SADIQ: “These women that we help now as defense attorneys, they would never have been able to raise their voice under the Taliban.”

00:14:17

KARISHMA VYAS: Najia says she’ll never forget what life was like under the brutal regime. She was only 12 when Taliban fighters seized her city…

00:14:27

SADIQ: “We weren’t allowed to go outside without a male guardian. Girls aged from 12 or 13 had to wear the burqa. School and college was forbidden for girls. Under the Taliban we were in complete darkness. We didn’t know about women’s rights. That they could separate from their husbands. Or punish the people who were violent towards them.”

00:14:52

SADIQ: “Eileen, honey, Eileen! My soul. Honey, honey. My soul.”

00:15:03

SADIQ: Najia now has a daughter of her own...and another baby on the way.

She says this is why she...and so many women...are worried that the Taliban may come back into power.

00:15:15

SADIQ: “I was just a child and it was so traumatic. I don’t want my children to go through this. So I’m fighting for my kids, for their future and for the future of this country.”

00:15:30

VYAS: Right now one of her most pressing cases is ‘Yasmin’.

00:15:36

SADIQ: “Have you gotten used to being here? Are you comfortable?”

00:15:42

VYAS: She has run away from her father … and a forced marriage. It’s up to Najia now to protect her using the law.

00:15:51

YASMIN:“He cocked his gun and put it against my head and said, ‘Why don’t you want to marry him? You have to marry him’. There were tiles on the kitchen floor. He grabbed me by the hair and banged my head against the floor again and again. Then he locked me in, and my older brother came. He hit me in the eye and it became swollen. Then he punched me in my mouth and broke six of my teeth. They were in pieces.”

00:16:23

VYAS: Najia says ‘Yasmin’ is fortunate that she could reach the shelter. That’s not always possible.

00:16:29

KARISHMA VYAS: -“In areas controlled by the Taliban are you able to help women who are maybe suffering from violence?...(N) We cannot help them because we don’t know about the violence there, what’s going on there.”

SADIQ: “It looks like everything is OK there. It looks like this. Because the woman doesn’t have any right, don’t have any right to raise their voice. So if you don’t hear something, how can you help someone?”

00:16:55

VYAS: Today...roughly half of Afghanistan is under the Taliban's control.

We don’t know how they’re treating women in these areas... because it’s too dangerous for us to go.

But a confidential source close to the Taliban said he could help us investigate…

After days of careful planning he was able to film this extraordinary footage...and smuggle it to us through government check-points.

It’s from a district in Ghazni province, which fell to the Taliban years ago.

00:17:35

SOUND-UP: “My message is that I’m a holy fighter. I’m not someone who gets tired of fighting so we’ll continue. We won’t accept defeat.”

00:17:50

VYAS: Here… we see fighters carrying AK47s and RPGs... parading through the district.

We hear from Taliban-appointed judges running their own courts...

What we don’t see in any of the footage is a single woman…

00:18:13

JUDGE USMANI: “Afghan women are the pride of the people of Afghanistan. Whatever we want for ourselves, we also want that for our sisters.”

00:18:20

VYAS: Their spokesman...Mansoor Ghaznavi...tells us that girls in the area are allowed to go to school.

00:18:28

MANSOOR GHAZNAVI: “We do have female madrassas in our district but they have to wear the hijab. Even in the future when we’re in government, we’ll allow them to go to school  according to Sharia law.”

00:18:40

VYAS: This might sound like progress...until you dig a little deeper….

00:18:46

GHAZNAVI: “Sharia law only allows women to wear the full hijab and to always be accompanied by a male relative. Because in the Koran it says that women should stay at home, and if they have to go out, they should be with a male relative.”

VYAS: Our contact presses him to be more specific -asking ‘will women have the right to work, study and marry whoever they want?’

GHAZNAVI: I can’t answer this question.”

00:19:19

VYAS: But we track down a young woman who can answer.

00:19:25

MASUDA: “My area is totally controlled by the Taliban…They forced young girls into marriage. They burnt down the school. There was a medical clinic, but they burnt that down too.”

00:19:40

VYAS: At first, ‘Masuda’ says girls still tried to go to school…but it didn’t last long.

00:19:47

MASUDA: “One day the Taliban came to my school and took a girl out and shot her, because she liked a boy. She was bleeding all over her body. We all screamed and ran away.”

00:20:00

VYAS: ‘Masuda’ was forced to marry when she was just 12.

She says her husband beat her and her father-in-law demanded sex.

She’s now in hiding…. but insurgents in her area have ordered her to come back.

00:20:16

MASUDA: “The Taliban said they’ll control all of Afghanistan soon anyway. Then they’ll execute me. They’re calling me from my mum’s phone. She’s begging me to come back. She says if you love me, you should come back. If I go back, they’ll kill me. If I don’t, they’ll kill my family.”

00:20:42

KARISHMA VYAS: Throughout the peace talks with the US, the Taliban has insisted that it has changed, and that it will uphold women’s rights.

00:20:52

VYAS: But these videos taken in areas under their control tell a different story. In this footage…. Taliban fighters are shown executing a woman accused of adultery.

These women were gunned down in the dead of night on a dirt road...because the Taliban thought they were prostitutes.

And this video from earlier this year shows a woman being publicly lashed …for singing and dancing.

00:21:37

FAWZIA KOOFI: “Even if they have changed truly, even if you believe them for what they say, it’s very unlikely that they actually impose what they say on their foot soldiers in Afghanistan.”

00:21:49

VYAS: Politician Fawzia Koofi is one of the few Afghan women to meet the Taliban face-to-face during the peace negotiations held in Russia and Qatar.

00:22:00

KOOFI: “Speaking in Moscow, in a five star hotel is much more easier than actually practicing it in Afghanistan in the rural villages through your foot soldiers who are not educated. What they have heard through the years of fighting is hate towards women, hate towards society, killing, murder. How do you change those perspectives?”

00:22:22

VYAS: But Fawzia saves her harshest criticism for the US ... which she says has failed to follow through on a war that it began.

00:22:31

KOOFI: -“You know the West came to Afghanistan not just because they wanted to save us. They came to Afghanistan after the 9/11 attack happened in New York. So they actually came to Afghanistan partly to save their own soil from terroristic attack. Now, just because the Americans want to leave, we just ignore the women?”

00:22:55

VYAS: It’s a question only the US government can answer...and they did not agree to speak to us.

What is clear is that after the death of tens of thousands of people… many view a peace deal with the Taliban as a stunning betrayal.

00:23:13

LAILA HAIDARI: “All those American and NATO soldiers who’ve been killed, they weren’t fighting me. I didn’t kill them. They were fighting the Taliban. The same Taliban that you’re now going to bring back into power.”

00:23:30

VYAS: Laila says the fate of her country and its women has never been more uncertain…

But…..she also has a warning for the West...

00:23:40

HAIDARI: “If American politicians can play with the future of Afghan women like this, then they can make the same deal for their own women. It’s possible. So American women need to stay vigilant, because their politicians can trade away their freedom too.”

00:24:03

VYAS: On my last day with her, Laila takes me to a place she often visits on the outskirts of Kabul...

00:24:11

HAIDARI: “Usually this place isn’t very crowded and women can feel free here. There’s no one to bother them. We feel like we can breathe here.”

00:24:25

VYAS: She says like most Afghans, she’s desperate for peace …..but not at any cost.

00:24:33

HAIDARI: “I don’t want my children to ask me, ‘What did you do when the Taliban came?’ I can’t tell them that I ran away. This is not peace, not for me, or for any woman.”

00:24:53

[AL JAZEERA]

00:25:00

[End]