Afghanistan: Women suicides under Taliban’s rule on the rise

Under the rule of the Taliban, suicides by women have been increasing, as at least one or two women kill themselves on a daily basis in Afghanistan, where women are subject to injustice and deprivation of basic rights.

“Every day there is at least one or two women who commit suicide for the lack of opportunity, for the mental health, for the pressure they receive,” said former Afghan Parliament Deputy Speaker Fawzia Koofi in a speech at the UN Human Rights Council on July 1.

She revealed that girls aged nine are being sold due to economic pressure or being useless to their families, saying, “It is not normal.”

Talking about the dire situation of women since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, Koofi said that the 28 percent of women quota in the parliament was reduced to zero participation, and the more than 30 percent of women in the civil services declined to zero. As for the number of students at schools, she said the number of children in schools reduced from 4 million to 1.5 million children.

Prior to Taliban rule, the suicides in Afghanistan, according to the latest WHO data published in 2020, reached 1,573, or 0.68 percent, of total deaths. 

Homayoun Forootan, head of the Badakhshan Provincial Hospital, said in mid-May that 30 people, including 27 women, attempted to commit suicide in just over three months in the city of Herat only, Afghanistan Times reported. Relatives of those who tried to kill themselves said that the reasons included poverty and unemployment.

Around 20 million people, or 50 percent of the population, are vulnerable to acute hunger, said an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis for the country on May 9.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said on July 1, that 1.2 million girls have no access to secondary education, while women’s businesses were shut down. In May, the Taliban government ordered working women to stay at home and that they should not go out without covering up their heads and wearing a blue burqa, which had been forced on women when the Taliban had previously taken power from 1996 to 2001.

The Taliban members are preparing a gathering for more than 3,000 Muslim scholars and tribal members, to be their largest meeting since assuming power, but no women have been invited, BBC reported on June 30.

“The de facto authorities I met with during my visit in March this year said they would honor their human rights obligations as far as [being] in line with Sharia law. Yet despite these assurances, we are witnessing the progressive exclusion of women and girls from the public sphere and their institutionalized, systematic oppression,” Bachelet said.

She added that the Taliban government makes women “invisible, by excluding them almost entirely from society.”