We'll Never Even Think of Going Back to Afghanistan Now: Women Refugees in India

On August 15, when her native city Kabul fell to the Taliban, 19-year-old Mariam Arzo Nooyar was crying at her house in south Delhi’s Bhogal, saying all hope of redemption for her war-torn Afghanistan was replaced by nightmares. Nooyar, an Afghan refugee, along with her family had moved to India seven years ago in hope of a safer and prosperous future.

“India is our home now and every year August 15 is the day of festivities in the country to mark its Independence Day. But this August 15, when India was celebrating its 75th Independence Day, we lost our, as Kabul fell to the Taliban that very day. I was depressed and sad, and cried the whole day in my room,” she said with a heaviness in her voice.

She was among the hundreds of Afghan refugees, mostly youths, who gathered and vociferously protested in front of the UNHCR office here amid deepening crisis in Afghanistan in the wake of takeover of the strife-torn nation by the Taliban.

“The Taliban claim to do their acts in the name of Islam. But killing innocent people and curbing rights of women, is it Islam? Today, the Taliban people are hunting those who worked for the US when it occupied Afghanistan and government officials, musicians, artists, journalists. I have no hope left for my Afghanistan,” Nooyar said.

Wearing a traditional scarf with the national colours of Afghanistan, she and her friend Kayenat Yusufi, 18, sit in a corner of a streetside near the UN Refugee Agency office in Vasant Vihar, to take a rest.

Yusufi, a class 12 student, points to her pair of black denim which she has paired with her traditional dress on top, accessorised with an Afghani scarf.

“In Afghanistan right now, I cannot even think of wearing this outfit. The Taliban men will beat me with sticks or rods and even shoot at me. I shudder to think what our fellow women and girls are undergoing in Afghanistan,” she lamented.

Yusufi and Nooyar shouted slogans during the protest as they are both volunteers of the Afghan Solidarity Committee, an umbrella organisation of Afghan refugees in India, which led the demonstration.

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