'As Afghan women, we begin to fight within our family, then our workplace, then society'
Fereshta Abbasi on growing up with refugee status in Iran, how Kabul taught her to fight for her rights, and the indomitable women protesting the Taliban takeover
Hello lovely readers,
This week it is my absolute honour to share the below conversation with human rights researcher, Fereshta Abbasi. Fereshta’s important work reminds us to find ways to uplift and support the women inside Afghanistan who continue protesting Taliban rule.
In this conversation, we discuss Fereshta’s childhood, the shock of moving from Iran to Afghanistan and the sudden stripping back of her rights as a girl. Fereshta shares how Scotland helped her heal from grief and explains what she wishes more people understood about the situation in Afghanistan.
Fereshta Abbasi is a Researcher in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, focusing on research and documentation of ongoing abuses in Afghanistan. For the past 10 years, she has documented human rights abuses in Afghanistan with different organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the All-Survivors Project. She was previously a legal advisor and holds an LLM in International law and Strategic Studies and was a Chevening Scholar. Fereshta has also published on human rights issues in the Afghan media.
To find out more about what is happening inside Afghanistan:
👉 Read Fereshta’s piece for The New Arab on how life under the Taliban is a ‘humanitarian and human rights nightmare’ as well as her article on how the situation in the country has regressed further, two years into the Taliban’s rule
👉 Check out Human Rights Watch report on Afghanistan and the United Nations reports on Afghanistan
👉 Here is an ABC news timeline of the events that took place since the Taliban returned to power and this is a CFR timeline of the US war in Afghanistan
How you can help support Afghan women:
👉 Amplify the work of those like Fereshta, who are working to protect protestors, and organisations like Human Rights Watch, to keep the conversation going — when the world looks away, the Taliban benefits
👉 If you would like, you can donate to keep Human Rights Watch going
I hope you take something from the below conversation, and as ever, I look forward to hearing your feedback! You can respond on substack, comment below, drop me a DM on socials at @helloitsparisa or respond to this email.
Parisa: I should start by letting you know my Farsi is really bad!
Okay, yeah. I was expecting to speak Farsi [for the interview].
Sorry, my name is misleading in that way.
No, it's totally fine. I was just expecting to when I saw your name. I was born in Iran, so I actually speak with a native Iranian accent. The Iranian dialect was the first I was exposed to so I spoke that as a child. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned to speak with our own [Afghan] dialect.
Interesting! I’d love to ask you about your time in Iran, but first, to start us off, I’d like to touch on the fact that yesterday we were supposed to have this call, but we delayed due to the events that took place in Kabul over the weekend. Could you explain what happened, and how that relates to what is happening across Afghanistan right now?
On Sunday evening, Kabul time, the Taliban arrested eight female protestors. We work around the clock [at Human Rights Watch] to document violations and make people aware of what is happening inside Afghanistan. I am from Afghanistan and I speak the local languages. [When arrests occur] the first thing we usually do is try to contact people inside to see what is happening. I’m not based there, which makes our work a bit more challenging since it is not easy to get information. The Taliban imposed restrictions on local media and access to information inside Afghanistan, and keep tightening them. So when something happens, verifying the incident on the ground and actively monitoring it is difficult. After a few hours, the protestors were released. The Taliban spokesperson for the minister of the interior totally denied the arrest of these women, but we can confirm they were detained.
This is not the first time the Taliban has arrested female protestors. Women in Afghanistan have been protesting since the beginning of the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Protests started in Herat, which is a city in western Afghanistan, and spread to the north and to the heart of the country. Since then, the Taliban has been arbitrarily detaining human rights activists, civil society activists, as well as female protestors. We published a report last September on how the Taliban treated female protestors in their detention. These women have told us they have been physically tortured, mentally tortured, the conditions of their release are very abusive, and their family members were brought in too. Public policing is something the Taliban are promoting in Afghanistan. If you're a woman and you do not have proper hijab, or if you go and protest, the first thing they do is tell your husband, brother, or a male member of the family that if it happens again, they will kill your husband. They threaten the male members of the family, which means that when the next incident occurs, your brother or husband makes sure you don’t go against the rules.
August 15th was the second anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover. It was a very dark anniversary, a moment for us all to reflect on how we lost Afghanistan. The Taliban announced the 15th of August as a public holiday to celebrate their victory. But it’s a very dark and grim picture for Afghans. In 2023, women in Afghanistan are the only women in the world who are not allowed to go to school. They do not have the right to most employment, no right to freedom of movement, no right to assembly. Taliban members also carried out extrajudicial killing and arbitrary detention of former security officers; the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan published a report that says since the Taliban took control, hundreds of former government employees or people who were critical former security officers were extrajudicially killed by Taliban members in the past two years. The arbitrary detention of journalists continues, and it has increased throughout the year. Paralleling this, there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis. More than two-thirds of the population is facing food insecurity. At the same time, the economic system has collapsed, and people do not have jobs. There is no hope for Afghans. I don’t think there is anything that can keep Afghans hopeful for the future under Taliban rule.
You've been so generous in your approach to discussing this topic in your work and really seem to pour so much into your writing. One thing you wrote that stood out to me was how Kabul is your first and last home. How do you feel about Kabul today?
I say that Kabul is the only city I love in this world. If there is one place I feel needs me the most, and I need to be there, it is definitely Afghanistan. I was born as a refugee in Iran. It was during the civil war in the 90s. Being born a refugee and living that life has its own difficulties. I did not have the right to education in Iran. My parents decided to return to Afghanistan after 9/11 and when I arrived, I spoke Farsi with an Iranian accent. It took me a bit of time to learn Kabuli dialect. We lived in Kabul for a while, and I think it was the first time I felt that somewhere was home. But Afghanistan has never been an ideal place for a woman to live. In the past 20 years, it has always been listed as one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman. But one of the things that existed there for me, and one of the reasons why I love Kabul, is because it gave me that platform to stand up for myself and fight. As an Afghan woman, you begin to fight within your family, then your workplace, and then in society. I have fought for my right to education, I have fought over what I want to wear, where I want to go, when I want to come back home, all of it. But there was a protection system, there was an environment we could fight in, and Kabul gave me that opportunity. That’s why I love it, I very much miss home. I still don’t feel resettled in the UK, and I am still hopeful to one day work inside Afghanistan for Afghanistan.
Most of my friends are still living or hiding in Kabul. We’re in constant touch because of my work, but also because I have many extended family members and friends there. I have a lot of memories there. Sometimes I ask friends to send me pictures of a café we used to go to or a park we used to visit. We video call and they just show me the streets. I ask them how life has changed, and I just cannot believe the pictures they show me from Afghanistan are the same places as the beautiful pictures in my mind. When my friends tell me that, for example, they cannot go to that café any more because women are not allowed or, they can go, but they need to be in hijab, they cannot put makeup on. But Kabul is a very strong city. It has witnessed a lot in the past two decades. It is still standing and there are still women who are protesting. It is still a home for women who are resisting repressive regimes.
One thing you mentioned, which we touched on earlier, was growing up in Iran as a refugee. What were you like growing up? What kinds of experiences did you have, and how have they shaped the work you do today?
My life is shaped around the conflict in my country. In the 90s, there was a civil war going on in Afghanistan and the people who left were deciding between Iran and Pakistan. My parents decided to go to Iran and that’s why I was born there. When you are young, you don’t know that you don’t belong to a country. It took me a while to understand that even though I was speaking the same language, I didn’t belong. They could recognise [that I was Afghan] from the way I look and the family I came from. At the time, the Iranian authorities were not issuing legal documents for refugees, and you had to renew your status every year. I remember the anxiety and stress my parents had to make sure we had the right documents so that I could go to school. There were a lot of complications surrounding that. My father was an educated person, but he was not allowed to work in his area of expertise. Then, when we returned to Afghanistan, I witnessed a totally different world. It was a huge shift. I had always heard we have a beautiful country and that everything is fine there, that I could go back and see my grandmother. But no one told me that women in Afghanistan are not respected. No one told me there would be discrimination against women. I witnessed this discrimination first-hand in my family. I remember seeing how people were treating my aunts. I was always treated differently than my cousins because I was a woman. And also because I was a very outspoken one. It could partly be due to the fact I had access to some level of education in Iran and was brought up in a different environment. In Iran, I saw women go to school, working, being independent. I saw all these things as a child and when I got to Afghanistan, I could not believe women couldn’t do those things. I think that is what pushed me into doing the work I do. I was very much committed to studying law, and I was a very revolutionary person at the time. I started reading books from Iranian authors and every time I read something I would imagine myself as the hero of that book. I just wanted to change everything overnight. So then I went to Harvard Law School to study law with the aim of enacting that change. I wanted to be an advocate for women’s rights. It took me some time to understand that life is more complicated, that the world is more complex, and that I am just one voice. But definitely, my experiences being brought up pushed me to do what I am doing today.
So eventually you came to the UK to continue your studies in human rights, with the expectation that you would be able to return to Afghanistan. But then, of course, August 2021 happened. What is your relationship like with the UK now, and how has that changed over time?
I came to the UK in 2019. I had lost a very dear friend the year before, and I was still going through that trauma. My friend was a journalist and he was killed in an attack by the ISKP which is Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan. He was 28 years old when he was killed, and it was a huge shock for me so I was definitely looking for somewhere I could heal a bit. That’s where my special bond with Scotland comes from. I went to Aberdeen and studied there and had a full year to reconstruct my values and how I feel. Scotland definitely helped with that. I mean, the UK still doesn’t feel like home. Partially because my mind has not accepted the fact I will be in this country for years. But also because of the anti-refugee and migrant policies the UK introduces every day. It can’t feel like home, we now see that. The resettlement schemes the UK has introduced are not moving ahead, or at least, they move very slowly. You can clearly see the UK government is not welcoming of refugees. I often say I am based in the UK because I cannot be based in Kabul and that’s why I have refugee status here.
What does a typical day look like for you?
It really depends on what happens in Afghanistan. The days start earlier for me because I usually try to know what is happening inside the country and there is a timezone difference. I follow the local news and speak to people on the ground. If there are cases like the one that happened over the weekend, I try to find relevant contacts and talk to people about what is happening. There are lots of meetings, research and writing. If there is a detention, for example, sometimes we need to put out a press release on the same day. If there is someone who has been detained, we try to find ways to help. It is very difficult to predict because sometimes you are taken by surprise. I was on leave last December when the Taliban closed universities for women. I worked through the whole year and had taken the month of December off but when I woke up to the news, I knew I needed to volunteer to work, we needed to put something out. But it is usually lots of linking facts with one another and trying to get an understanding of what exactly is happening there.
You mentioned earlier that you were influenced by some Iranian writers. One of the questions I ask everybody I interview is: what is the cultural text or the cultural artefact that had the biggest impact or left the biggest mark on you?
For me, it might be in reverse because I was very resistant to everything I was exposed to. My mum always tried to make sure I was a good girl. When we were in Iran, she signed me up for cooking school. I was a little girl, but she still wanted me to learn to cook. Everything that they wanted to dictate, I didn’t want to do. So my mum didn’t know I could cook well until I started living by myself in Kabul when I was about 23 years old. And I used to argue a lot. When I meet family as an adult — we are all scattered around the world — they always tell me I am so much calmer and more peaceful now. I was constantly trying to prove I was right. So I think that culture, Afghanistan’s culture, promoted a resistance in me and pushed me to be the person I am.
If people take away just one thing from reading this interview, what should it be?
I wish people knew the situation in Afghanistan is dire, and that it's just getting worse and worse. Especially after the war started in Ukraine, because all the attention has gone from Afghanistan. People could speak about it. I think we all as individuals have a responsibility to make sure that we keep raising awareness about what is happening in situations like Afghanistan. When the war started in Ukraine, the way the world responded to refugees was amazing. I wish we had that platform too. This is a responsibility not only for governments but for individuals, for organisations, and for all of us to know Afghans have seen decades of war. They deserve sympathy, and they deserve to live in dignity with their basic rights respected. We all need to take responsibility to make sure that, wherever they are, they can build a life. Because it is not easy to begin everything from zero, to begin your life from scratch. Even though I was in the UK during the Taliban takeover, it’s still an intense emotional struggle. There is a lot going on for me, and I am sure it is even more difficult for those who have been evacuated. I hope people can be kinder and remember many of us still have family members living inside the country who are living in daily trauma.