Good Monday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions. A year ago today, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Since then, FERESHTA ABBASI has watched her country descend into a humanitarian and human rights crisis.
Abbasi was born a refugee in Iran after her parents fled Afghanistan in the 1990s to escape the Taliban's rule.
She returned after the Taliban was driven from power following 9/11. Life was not easy. But, Abbasi writes, "I was able to study. There were rules and cultural norms I disagreed with, but I had the freedom to push back against them. I could fight to wear what I wanted, decide what to think, and choose when to laugh."
Abbasi went to university and began working in the new government. And she had hope: "We were working to build a democratic Afghanistan, a place governed by the rule of law, where women and girls had opportunity, where the media were free, and every child had the right to education."
Things changed when the U.S. brokered a deal with the Taliban that excluded the Afghanistan government, leading to last year's takeover.
Abbasi, now a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Washington, D.C., is heartbroken over the state of her country. And she becomes angry when she sees "foreign diplomats meeting with Taliban leaders abroad, smiles beaming, women conspicuously absent from the photos."
What can be done? Abbasi isn't calling for military intervention or regime change. Her requests are modest — that the United Nations impose travel bans on senior Taliban officials and collect evidence of the grave human rights abused being committed; that the World Bank address mass hunger in Afghanistan without funding the Taliban; that countries open their arms to Afghan refugees.
Many of Abbasi's family members and friends remain in Afghanistan, which is heartbreaking for her. But she refuses to lose hope. "We have lost our beautiful Afghanistan for now," she writes, "but it is still my home."
Read Abbasi's op-ed here.
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