“A group more extreme than the Taliban is rampant and removes young girls … Often, those who come back commit suicide”

Accompanied by a man as required by the Sharia law that is applied to it, but simply veiled, Chela Noori was able to cross the roads of Jalalabad in Kandahar, from Herat to Kabul that she left for France at the time of the Russian invasion, in the early 1980s, after the assassination of her father, governor of the cursed city.

Paris Match: What was the goal of your trip to Afghanistan?

Chela youth: I had not returned to Afghanistan since 2017. I heard everything and its opposite, I wanted to see with my own eyes, not content myself with the reports that I could read or see on television, what my team or family on the spot told. It was also necessary to settle some complications that the association which distributes food aid to isolated women and their children meets in Kabul.

When you landed on May 21 in Kabul, did you recognize the city?

Eight years have passed and a lot has changed. The first thing that struck me is the feeling of peace that reigns. It’s strange to say that, but when we think about it since those who were at the origin of the attacks, troubles and insecurity seized power, this threat logically disappeared. And in this appeasement, it is also the return to the Middle Ages. We talk a lot about girls, but even boys no longer go to school. Only those who have the means go there. Almost everyone is looking for work, because you should know that there is no more in Afghanistan. The idle men wander in the streets, waiting for us to come to hire them during the day.

Is there any more economic life?

The markets are crowded, the stores open and supplied, while part of the population is deprived of financial means. The beggars if present in the past have disappeared from the streets. They hide because if they are caught by (alibans, we throw them in prison.

“Women are in total distress”

Did it seem to you that women suffer?
They are in total distress. I was able to collect the testimonies of 15 of them which will be the subject of a documentary. Those who studied or worked and found themselves deprived of any working life are unhappy and in depression. Their lives are now confined to staying at home, they barely have the right to go out shopping, the only walk that is tolerated. I tested all the parks, they are indeed prohibited from them.

They no longer want to have children because they say it is impossible to have them without money. And those of high society which have more means and which I have been able to meet are just as depressed. What are they wondering about their lives … cleaning? It does not occupy a whole day … I met a former government employee who told me that her only occupation was to take care of her son and put away her house, the rest of the time, she passes him to wait … She took me all her wardrobe, outfits as we wear here in France, tailors, she told me that she could not go back into it because her depression was enormously. You also have to talk about little girls. I collected the testimonies of seven of them, including three little eight years old schoolgirls that I took in my car. I questioned them to find out if they went to school. They replied yes. The three of them wanted to become a doctor, but that they knew that at the age of entering the school in adolescence would be prohibited and that makes them very unhappy. I interviewed a 12 year old girl. She knew she was in her last year of study. She began to cry. She said that she was going to become less than nothing. All they ask for is that the Taliban lets them access education.

Has the behavior of men towards them changed into the private sphere?

All the men I have seen, mainly illiterate, told me that their children, including girls, are studying. They realize that when they age and will no longer be able to earn their lives, they will not be able to help them because of what they are imposed on them today. Under this government, there is no more education. Girls are private, and boys cannot access it because they are forced to go to work to eat and help their parents pay the drafts. We know that they are not going to leave, but please tell international bodies who think about recognizing them that they are increasing this recognition to the right for women to access studies, to work. Without that, Afghanistan will not move forward.

Have you ever felt in danger during this trip?

The Taliban have orders, they do not want to grab and hold on to get out of the framework of the law. On the other hand, I discovered that there is now a more extremist and radical group. They are called “Amres Ben Marouf”, which means “Ben Marouf’s orders”. I did not know them before, but I was told that they were already there during the first takeover by the Taliban. They are everywhere in the country and numerous, recognizable by their long black beards and their clothing: they are dressed in white with a black turban. They are harder, really apply Sharia law to the letter and do not support, for example, to see women without burqa, to see them in the streets. At the slightest pretext they stop them, beat them in public with sticks. In Kabul mainly, many women just circulate covered with a veil, a medical mask covering their lower face.

Where do they come from?

I don’t know. I was told they came from Arab countries …

“They send them to pick young girls”

Okay and what emerges from your trip? What can we do today to help Afghan women and Afghans in general?

Initially, the Ben Marouf group was known to remove girls … to make the thing legal from the point of view of Sharia law, they are now accompanied by Taliban women who serve them as a deposit. They send them to pick these young girls or women under the pretext of incorrect outfits, then force them to get into their cars. Some disappear for good, others reappear but which almost always end up committing suicide …

For what ?

No doubt because what they undergo is a shame for the family … because if they are no longer virgin, they can no longer claim to be married. I interviewed one who admitted to me out of camera: “I’m going to tell you something that I didn’t even say to my own mother. I was removed for an hour …” Then, she melted in tears and resumed: “I can’t tell you because if I talk, I’m going to commit suicide.”

Are you going to release a documentary?

I filmed all these women I interviewed. They all accepted, and they even agreed to appear without mask but I refused because the Taliban even looks at what we publish in the West. Their faces will be blurred because I fear too much that it happens to them anything. You should know that they are hunted down. I slept in Herat in a very large family, rich and influential. Their three daughters refused the interview because they knew that being known, even blurred, they were exposed to serious trouble. They were respectively in the university of language, law and the school of midwives before the Taliban seizure in August 2021. All of them told me that it has been almost four years since they no longer move from their four-story house. They can no longer bear their situation: “What do you want to do all day? Go up, go down, go up, go down?” They have a magnificent park just behind but it is forbidden to them, only men have the right to go there.

Are there still, like former beauty salons where they can meet?

No, I asked them how they did when there were weddings. One of them told me that she had installed a clandestine aesthetic lounge at home, by spirit of rebellion. “We make up between us and we go to weddings,” she told me. I was also told the story that dates back to three months of this woman who, returning from a wedding one evening in Kabul, was stopped aboard a car by the Taliban. She did not wear a mask, was made up and seated in front of her husband, while three other men in her family were on the rear seat. The Taliban killed her on the spot …

You went beyond Kabul, in other cities. Is it the same observation everywhere?

I took a rental car because I wanted to browse all the regions to measure the condition of the roads, know if as in the past we were stopped there, kill. All that, thank God, it no longer exists. From 5:00 am, you see workers building these roads, there are many sites. This is the only positive thing I saw in Afghanistan. There are checkpoints everywhere and I got quasy almost systematically. Because I was sitting at the front of the vehicle, which women do not have the right to do … or even that I was driving. It was my form of resistance to the new masters of the country. I did not put the veil either as they wanted.

What was the attitude of men who hold these military dams towards you Western Afghane?

I was taken my passport all the time, we photographed it, I was asked questions and then I was released. I had a few little problems in Herat where, the man who accompanied me, because it was compulsory and I was arrested because I was driving. I got burned as not possible, dealing with a fool of everything you can imagine as misogynist.

“All Afghans are treated as malpropers”

In France, you are an interpreter and work for many structures that manage Afghan migrants, do you see a lot of flows?

No, the country is barricaded, and only men can sometimes manage to take the roads to exile. Most illiterate are those who integrate the fastest, because they accept low jobs to support their families. I would like to take the opportunity to point the finger at the recent and scandalous remarks of Didier Leschi, current director of the OFII (French Office for Immigration and Integration). He claims that there would be a rush from Afghans to France, that we would be more than 100,000. While in fact, it is barely 0.15% of the French population, which is not huge. He says, without discernment, that it is a dangerous population, which commits a lot of abuses, which stigmatizes the whole community. By saying that 90% of Afghans are favorable to the application of Sharia law, which is completely false, he preaches the hatred of the other, in a political context that we know, in full breakthrough of the extreme right. Because of him, on racist sites, all Afghans are treated like malpropers, vaurians, criminals.

Afghan Association of France

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