Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/MADRID: Pushing her son on the swing at the playground on a cold winter’s day in Madrid, Obaida Sharar, ex-afghan prosecutor, expresses relief that she found asylum in Spain after fleeing Kabul shortly after the Taliban government took over.
According to Reuters, Obaida, who arrived in Madrid with her family, is one of nineteen women prosecutors to find asylum in the country after being left in Pakistan without official refugee status for up to a year after the Taliban returned to the government.
She said that she feels selfishly being happy while her fellow women suffer.
Afghan females
“Most Afghan girls and women who remain in Afghanistan do not have the right to study, to have a social life, and even go to a beauty salon,” Sharar said. “I can’t be happy.”
Women’s and girls’ freedoms in her country were abruptly curtailed with the arrival of the Taliban, who enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic rule.
The Taliban administration has banned most women aid workers and, the previous year stopped women and girls from attending high school and university.
Sharar’s work and that of her women peers while they lived in Kabul were dangerous. Women judges and prosecutors were threatened and became the target as they undertook work overseeing the trial and conviction of men accused of afghan gender crimes, including murder and rape.
She was part of a group of 32 women judges and prosecutors who left Afghanistan only to be stuck in the neighbouring country Pakistan for up to a year to find asylum.
