KABUL (Reuters) – Days after the Taliban administration in Afghanistan announced in July that all women’s beauty salons must be closed within a month, videos on social media showed groups of women protesting on the streets in Kabul, as well as in their homes, with many holding signs that read: “Bread, justice, work.”
Since taking over Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban administration has barred girls and women from high schools, colleges, universities and most jobs, including working for the United Nations and non-government organizations.
Afghan women have pushed back, taking to the streets to oppose the Taliban, and moving their protests indoors and online as arrests and violent crackdowns grew, according to research by the Center for Information Resilience, a non-profit.
Organizing through WhatsApp and Telegram groups, Afghan women have posted pictures and videos of the protests on Facebook, Instagram and X — formerly known as Twitter, drawing attention to the worsening crisis, and enabling international rights groups to document abuses and opposition to the Taliban.
“The images of women protesting on the streets have been the single most important factor in compelling the international community not to look away,” said Heather Barr, women’s rights associate director at Human Rights Watch.
“The indoor protests feel like a valuable way of saying, in between the very risky street protests: “We’re still here. Just because you don’t see us on the streets every day it does not mean that our resistance is over,“” she said.
Several of the indoor protests are organized by the Purple Saturdays Movement, a women’s rights group that was formed two days after the fall of Kabul, and has hundreds of members.
It moved its demonstrations indoors after dozens of its members were arrested and imprisoned, said founder Maryam Marof Arwin, a former television news anchor.
“Even broadcasting our protests on social media networks, we are insulted, warned, and threatened with prison and death by the Taliban and their supporters,” she said.
“But we will not give up our fight to bring the crimes of the Taliban to the eyes and ears of the world,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Taliban banned the Internet when they first controlled Afghanistan in the late-1990s, but have since embraced social media to broadcast their messages and attack critics.