Five years after the Taliban swept back into Kabul, Afghanistan remains a country in chains. The radical Islamist rulers have imposed what activists call gender apartheid, silencing women, shuttering schools, and driving millions into poverty.
“Under the Taliban, the country has changed profoundly,” said Manizha Bakhtari, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Austria, at a press conference in Vienna. She described a regime that has issued around 250 decrees against women, banning them from education after age 13, most jobs, travel without a male relative, and even speaking loudly in public. Academics, journalists, and activists face floggings, amputations, or death for speaking out.
Bakhtari warned that thousands of new religious schools are training a generation of boys in Taliban ideology, spreading instability across the region and into Europe. An estimated 600,000 Afghans now live in Germany, Sweden, France, and Austria, with 55,000 in Austria alone, according to derStandard.
Despite the threats, resistance continues. Masomah Regl, from Graz’s integration department, said women still protest, as they did in Herat in June, before being arrested. Underground schools and online classes run from the diaspora keep education alive for girls over twelve. But Regl fears this is not enough. “Not everything built in 20 years of democratic government has been destroyed yet,” she said. “What happens in ten years, when trained doctors and midwives retire and are replaced by a generation of half-literate women?”
Wolfgang Petritsch, veteran diplomat and president of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, called the situation a litmus test for the world. “This cannot go on. Pressure on the Taliban must increase.” Austria, set to join the UN Security Council in January, can help expand the UN mission in Afghanistan and push for renewed peace talks.
Petritsch rejected invitations to Taliban representatives in Vienna or Brussels, warning such meetings normalize a brutal regime. Lukas Gahleitner-Gertz from Asylkoordination agreed, noting Austria grants asylum to 85 percent of Afghan applicants yet still seeks deportations. “This approach is highly contradictory,” he said.
