by Kene Obiezu

US-based Cable News Network (CNN) recently captured a desperately tarnished trade: the sale of Afghan girls by their families to survive.

In the video, a man old enough to be her great-grandfather is seen dragging away a girl of about seven years after handing a wad of cash to her family. Girls as young as four have also been sold in the despicable trade. Their fate in the hands of depraved paedophiles posing kindly guardians with be physical and sexual abuse with the attendant physiological and psychological scars.

In 2021, after twenty years, the US decided to end all operations in Afghanistan. Until then, the US had helped maintain a fragile peace in the country, critically pinning depraved Taliban fighters to the rugged mountains from where they fantasized about young girls.

Withdrawing US troops in 2021, President Joe Biden had declared that he could no longer justify American involvement in the internal war of another country.

With US troops gone, the Taliban came triumphantly to town, immediately rolling out their trademark tactics of religious terror masked as statecraft. The return of the Taliban has meant full-blown terror for women in a country where women were finally beginning to cast off the veils imposed on them by religion and culture, to participate in rebuilding one of Asia’s most iconic countries.

When the group was in power before 2001, women had been subjected to all sorts of restrictions targeting their bodies and identities. There were restrictions to education, appearance in public and participation in public life.

The Taliban’s return has marked a darker version of persecution and oppression of women. Women and girls older than 12 can no longer go to school. In August, the Taliban banned women from singing in public. Some days ago, the Taliban in its most obnoxious legislation yet decreed that women can no longer speak to each other in public.

Why is the Taliban so afraid of women? Why is the terrorist group systematically creating the conditions that will keep women enslaved in Afghanistan? The answer is simple: in women, the Taliban cannot only sense its defeat, it can sense it.

No society has ever been able to shake off the chaotic chains of theocratic oppression without the full and forceful participation of women. In a world which insists on patriarchy very much to its detriment, keeping women in check has always been a favourite strategy of tyrants. This is because once women find their voice and muster their feet, the stable of the oppressed is dismantled, and finally, equality and equity without which no egalitarian society can be built are provided in abundance. That is the power women have – the power to equalize society and birth the end of oppression and the beginning of freedom. Only women can do this and that is why terrorism has always been about oppressing women.

With the Taliban tactlessly expanding its reign of terror in Afghanistan, families are being forced to make impossible choices. Families are having to sell off their pre-teen girls. Trade in human beings under any guise is not only exceptionable, it is unarguably the darkest brand of human depravity. When the human beings in question are girls as young as four, there are simply no words.

Women and girls are not commodities and should never be treated as such. Even in Nigeria, the failure to build a society where everyone is equal has led to the commoditization of women, especially in the North where religion and culture still impose back-breaking restrictions on women.

The systemic oppression of women on which the world is built cannot end without equality for women. Ending this ancient injustice is not possible unless women become more visible and have a voice just as loud and as respected as any other.

While the madness goes on in Afghanistan, the world must not forget to bear witness to the dignity of its enslaved women.

*Obiezu can be reached at keneobiezu@gmail.com