When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Zuhal Azizi went into hiding.
As a woman working in a non-governmental organization with foreigners, she knew she was a target.
Even in 2019, two years before the Taliban took over, her office was attacked by suicide bombers. Azizi spent hours taking refuge in a safe room. She survived but not all of her colleagues did.
After the attack, Zuhal, 26, knew she was at risk. The Taliban knew her identity and made their intentions clear through death threats.
“If we find these girls, we’ll kill them” was a direct warning she received from the Taliban.
When the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in August 2021, those threats escalated to frequent calls and texts from unknown numbers, saying they had all of her information. “Wherever you are, we will find you,” they said.
The Taliban have banned women and girls from secondary and higher education. They dictate what women wear and how they should travel, and restrict their access to work, recently banning women from working in NGOs.
Azizi stopped going to work after the Taliban takeover and hid, eventually travelling to Pakistan in May 2022, and then to Victoria last November.
With the help of a sponsorship group, Azizi and two other Afghan women activists, Rokhshana Rezai and Tahmina Akakhil, settled in Victoria, sharing a home together. Azizi found work similar to her previous role at the Vancouver Island Counselling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees.
Here, she’s tasting freedom for herself, but she worries about her sisters and family left behind. Her sisters, a journalist and a teacher, can no longer work and the family is under constant threat, from her abusive former brother-in-law who has joined the Taliban.
As she celebrates International Women’s Day, she’s thinking of those women still struggling for freedom in her home country.
“In Afghanistan, women are living, but they are not alive. It’s very difficult being a woman in Afghanistan,” Azizi said.
Corey Levine, a Victoria woman who has spent the past 20 years on and off working in Afghanistan, and helped organize the private sponsorships to bring over Azizi, Rezai and Akakhil, has seen the drastic change in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.
“Their lives have been erased,” said Levine, who has worked with the UN and Amnesty International in Afghanistan.
She said it’s a reminder that gains for women’s rights can never be taken for granted.
“Afghanistan has shown us 20 years of improving on women and girls’ rights, and just all taken away in the blink of an eye. We really should not underestimate how easily we can lose our hard-fought rights, even what’s happening south of the border,” she said, referring to the loss of abortion rights in much of the U.S. over the last year.
Levine has helped to organize five private sponsorships to bring Afghan women at risk to Canada. Two have not yet arrived. She wishes there were more people interested in contributing to sponsorships and a greater capacity in Victoria to receive Afghan refugees.
“Then it would be possible to bring more women at risk to Canada — women like Tahmina, Zuhal and Rokhshana — who are so deserving of the opportunity to have a life,” she said.
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