In an Afghanistan once again ruled by the Taliban, there exist public executions, floggings, and lashings of alleged criminals. A recent edict has also signalled the resumption of stoning for adultery. The Taliban’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, declared:

‘You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles… [But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.’

It was clear from the start that the Taliban intended to create an Islamic theocracy. Recent developments along that road were inevitable—and also inevitably, Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls are the ones who have suffered the most for this.

In December 2022, over a year after the Taliban’s re-ascension to power, they brought in a ban on women working in national and international NGOs. In April 2023, women were also banned from working with UN agencies. As Philip Loft of the House of Commons Library noted, ‘For 70% of these women, this was also their family’s main source of income.’ All the while, both the US and the UN continue to provide humanitarian aid to the country. As ProPublica has reported, ‘The U.S. remains the largest donor of aid to Afghanistan, providing a total of about $2.6 billion since the collapse of the previous Afghan government.’ There are credible fears that at least some of this money is being diverted to the Taliban. As US Representative Michael McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated, ‘The U.S. government must work harder to prevent the Taliban from benefiting from humanitarian aid.’

The Taliban’s curtailment of women’s freedom has meant the deprivation of incomes for thousands of families and a reliance on foreign aid. However, this is not the Taliban’s only source of income. Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi MBE, the founder of the European Campaign for Human Rights for the People of Afghanistan, said to me that ‘the Taliban makes a lot of its money from opium production and lithium mining’, the latter of which involves Chinese investment. Although an uncertain industry in Afghanistan, lithium mining is potentially very lucrative, with Foreign Policy reporting in April 2023 that China had signed a deal worth ‘$10 billion for access to lithium deposits’.

The tragedy of the Taliban takeover in August 2021 is hard to overstate. Samira Hamidi, an Afghan women’s rights activist, told me that ‘the catastrophe in the country is getting worse’, and that ‘in the twenty years in between the Taliban’s time in power, most women and girls were trying to work, educate themselves, and build better lives.’ That freedom was denied to them for so long pre-2001, granted for a brief period, and then snatched away again is an open wound, felt within Afghanistan and in the diaspora. This state of affairs is hardly accidental or limited to education. Hamidi also told me that in governmental offices there are ‘signs telling women they are not allowed to enter.’ The systematic exclusion of women and girls from public life is an intentional move away from the ‘democratic principles’ Akhundzada so scornfully mentioned.

Despite this, a small light flickers, and there have been some brave acts of resistance. Hamidi said to me that ‘there were mass protests at the beginning, consisting mainly of women and girls.’ Although the protests have tapered off, ‘there are individual actions from brave individuals including human rights activists, women, and journalists.’ For instance, Ismail Mashal, a journalism professor who ran a private university, ripped up his academic records on live TV, handed out books in public, and refused to discriminate between his female and male students. For his courage and solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, he was met with violence and imprisonment.

Mashal’s stand was particularly notable given the pre-eminence of women in the protests against the Taliban. As a Human Rights Watch report noted in February 2023:

‘Mashal’s sense of justice, solidarity, and dissent provided a ray of hope in a country where peaceful protests are often solely championed by women. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, public protests involving Afghan men standing up for women’s rights have been rare.’

This fact is another aspect of the tragedy: those with the most to lose, women, have made the greatest sacrifices to retain their freedoms, while the lack of solidarity from the other half of the population is one reason for their failure.

The Window of Hope women’s movement, an organisation fighting gender apartheid, recently released a statement:

‘We Afghan women have always raised our voice against the violation of human rights and the systematic suppression and elimination of women since the Taliban took over. Our voice should have been heard. But today, unfortunately, by ignoring the wishes of women and the people of Afghanistan, the process of systematic exclusion of women, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners, extra-legal gang rape trials of prisoners, suppression of ethnic and religious minorities has become a normal thing.’

That last fact is one too often forgotten. Despite claiming the status of an Islamic state, which should in theory not discriminate between different peoples, the Taliban is a deeply racist and sectarian organisation. Primarily populated by Pashtuns, they consider only themselves as ‘proper’ Afghans. Dr Nasimi told me that ‘the Taliban, when they entered Kabul, shot many members of the Tajik and Hazara ethnic groups.’

This is old behaviour recreated in new circumstances. A Human Rights Watch report from November 1998 chronicled the massacre of thousands of Hazara men and boys in the northwestern city of Mazar-i Sharif. This is further supported by a September 2020 written submission from the Hazara Research Collective to the International Relations and Defence Committee within the UK Parliament: ‘Over 8,000 Hazaras were systematically killed by the Taliban in the Mazar-i Sharif massacre of 1998.’

Ethnic and religious hatred is a sign of a disordered and diseased ideology, and this thread of violence connects the Taliban of the 1990s to the Taliban of today. A former government advisor who worked in the government overthrown by the Taliban in 2021 told me that ‘people in Afghanistan are not mentally well, they do not have any position in the country’s social and political life, they are not free to express themselves and all people think of is how to escape the country.’ There is undoubtedly truth in what he says. But, as the words and deeds of Afghanistan’s brave women show, a small light still exists, and one day, it shall burn much more brightly.

Related reading

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

A new pact for atheism in the 21st century, by Leo Igwe

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan appeared first on The Freethinker.

Six months on from 7 October, the Israeli war on Gaza continues. The recent withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza should not be misunderstood. It is a tactical decision, made in response to the ongoing hostage negotiations taking place in Cairo, as well as growing international pressure on Israel to temper its bellicosity towards the civilian population.

Last month, Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK). These deaths brought the number of aid workers killed in Gaza to over 196, but since then the number has risen to 203. Israel apologised for the strikes on the WCK convoy, declared them to have been a mistake resulting from significant errors and protocol violations, and removed two senior officers from their posts. However, there is reason to think the strikes were a deliberate targeting of the aid convoy as a means of undermining humanitarian efforts in Gaza. Firstly, the WCK convoy had agreed and coordinated its movements with the IDF beforehand. Secondly, the IDF launched three separate strikes on the WCK vehicles in turn. Finally, the convoy was marked with the WCK logo, and all the passengers were civilians. Another example, taking place earlier this year, illustrates why this incident cannot be considered in isolation.

In January 2024, Israel made unsubstantiated claims about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); Israel claimed that a dozen or so employees of the agency were members of Hamas. The US, alongside the UK and several other Western countries, decided to suspend their funding to UNRWA based on Israel’s word alone. Even if the accusation against UNRWA was true, the organisation employs 30,000 people across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The complicity of a negligible amount of people in atrocities would not justify the suspension of funds to an organisation responsible for the provision of humanitarian relief to millions of people.

The United States admitted its inability to verify Israel’s claims. Moreover, the EU’s humanitarian chief said in March that there was no evidence from Israel to back up its claims about UNRWA. A UN-led review likewise found no evidence to support Israel’s claims, but, as the title of Julian Borger’s Guardian articles ruefully notes, the ‘damage to [the] aid agency is done’. Most recently, the German government announced that it would resume the funding to UNRWA that it had suspended. This is especially telling, given the virtually unconditional support Germany has otherwise provided Israel.

We therefore find ourselves in a situation in which Israel is responsible for the destruction of the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza and makes unfounded claims about the only relief agency able to provide significant help, while simultaneously urging its allies to suspend funding to this very same agency. In doing so, Israel has denied itself the right to be trusted when it declares that attacks against aid convoys are mere accidents. The BBC reported on 5 April that:

‘The Erez Gate in northern Gaza will be reopened for the first time since the start of the war, and the Israeli container port of Ashdod—which is close to Gaza—will accept humanitarian supplies. More aid from Jordan will also be allowed to enter via the Kerem Shalom Crossing.’

If Israel could reopen the Erez crossing and begin to use the port of Ashdod before, and had chosen not to do so, despite the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, the logical implication is that it has been intentionally withholding aid. A Palestinian physician, Dr Duha Shellah, commenting on the distribution of aid into Gaza, told me that the ‘Volunteer committees responsible for coordinating and delivering aid have been targeted by the Israeli military.’ Likewise, hearing from colleagues, family, and friends, she speaks of ‘people eating grass, animal food, anything to survive.’ Israel’s claims about UNRWA led to $450 million worth of funding being suspended; in light of the dire plight of many Palestinians, this shows the fatal consequences of false—or at the very least unfounded—claims.

Recent revelations about the Israeli military’s application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the war on Gaza by the IDF also provide a sinister window into how Israel has been conducting its war. The Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, writing for +972 Magazine, has reported that ‘The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. The system is called ‘Lavender’ and its existence and use in the current war was revealed by six Israeli intelligence officers. The obvious question arises—are these Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants being targeted? And, even if they are, would using AI to target them be justified?

Well, Abraham reports that the six Israeli officers say ‘the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity.’ The explanation for this was simple. One of the intelligence officers declared that ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

In The Guardian’s report, one Israeli officer said that, in using Lavender, ‘I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.’ In the field of AI the idea of the ‘human in the loop’ is a cornerstone of ethical and practical thinking. The idea is that human beings, informed (and constrained by) their reason and ethics, can be accountable for the actions of AI. The essential negation of the human in the loop in the use of Lavender shows the depths of callousness the IDF have reached in their war on the people of Gaza.

The figures for the dead in Gaza are unlikely to be exact. However, given the ID numbers provided to residents in the small enclave and the corroboration of figures from various sources, it seems probable that the figure of over 30,000 dead is accurate. As of April, Save the Children reported that over 13,800 children had been killed in Gaza. In the face of this catastrophe, what role have Western powers played?

It is without a doubt true to say that virtually unanimous and unconditional support has been provided to Israel, particularly from the United States. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documents that ‘The US has approved more than 100 weapons transfers to Israel since October 7, and exported 8,000 military rifles and 43,000 handguns in 2023’. The BBC, in an article documenting where Israel gets its arms from, reported that ‘The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.’

The exact percentage figure of Israeli imported arms coming from the US is 65.6%. Trailing in second place is Germany, responsible for 29.7%. Although the United Kingdom does not provide as much as the other two powers, it nonetheless sold £42 million worth of arms to Israel in 2022 and since 2015 has granted arms export licences to Israel worth £442 million. This includes helicopters, aircraft, missiles, grenades, armoured vehicles, and tanks. Whatever drop in the larger ocean this constitutes, the UK has armed Israel and continues to provide it with diplomatic and political support at the United Nations.

Apologists for Israel tend to recycle the well-worn phrase that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’. Ahmed Benchemsi, the MENA spokesman for HRW, however, described the situation differently to me: ‘What is happening in Gaza now is more like a mediaeval siege, in which the whole population is punished in retaliation for crimes committed by a small minority of combatants.’ Collective punishment is illegal under international law, so all of Hamas’s crimes on 7 October notwithstanding, Israel’s actions against the population of Gaza are illegal. A recent HRW report covering the West Bank also noted that:

‘Israeli settlers have assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools under the cover of the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.’

This is corroborated by Dr Mahmoud Wohoush, a doctor working in the West Bank, who told me that ‘Settler violence in the West Bank tremendously increased after Oct 7th and…the Israeli forces protect them [the settlers] and provide any needed support as many of the settlers are their relatives and friends.’ He goes on to say that ‘This escalation has been fostered by the politicians, particularly the extremists in the current right wing government. They are following the instructions from their religious leaders to kill the Palestinians to uproot them from their land.’ We often hear of the fanaticism of Hamas, sometimes generalised to the Palestinians at large, yet how often do we hear on Western airwaves of the fanaticism of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who think, by divine right, that the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’ should be granted to them alone?

These accounts, by HRW and by Palestinians on the ground, are crucial to note for two reasons. Firstly, the Israelis are committing crimes in the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, nor any seriously organised armed Palestinian resistance group fighting them. Secondly, the war in Gaza is giving cover to the dispossession and abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank, something which has been ongoing for decades, long before 7 October.

The war in Gaza represents—and is—a war on the Palestinian people. The high civilian death toll, combined with the suspension of funding to UNRWA, the application of AI, and increasing settler violence in the West Bank, prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Further reading

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

The post Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people appeared first on The Freethinker.

The civil war in Sudan broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly referred to as Hemedti. These two men jointly supported the popular revolution against dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and likewise partnered in 2021 to remove the transitional civilian government that took al-Bashir’s place. This partnership, however, was simply a marriage of convenience, and in the spring of 2023, the underlying tensions between the two factions erupted into full-scale war.

These tensions can be explained as a struggle over power, land and resources. The two warring sides are military factions that were part of the old regime. The SAF are the official armed forces of the state of Sudan, while the RSF were founded as a militia by al-Bashir two decades ago. With the dictator gone, and having sidelined the civilian population, these two factions went to war to gain control of the country.

Little in the way of ideology, racial or religious, has been driving the conflict. As Sudanese doctor and activist Moe Ali told me, the conflict is ‘not divided into Sudanese Arabs and Sudanese blacks. The SAF and RSF are killing anyone who gets in their way…In Sudan there are no clear cut-off lines between Arabs, Sudanese, etc.—we’re all mixed.’ (Note that there are over 500 ethnic groups in the country.) This is not to disregard the ethnic dimensions of the conflict, which certainly exist—see, for example, the RSF massacres of the Masalit people in the west of the country. It is simply to argue that ethnicity is not a primary driver of the central conflict between the organised military forces of the SAF and the RSF. In any case, given the scale of violence unleashed on the civilian population, regardless of the outcome of the war, the dream of democracy ignited by the popular revolution in 2019 is dead for now. Neither side believes in democracy, as evidenced by their joint overthrow of the transitional civilian government in 2021.

Thus far, the civil war in Sudan has produced the largest internally displaced population in the world. The United Nations estimated in January this year that over 10 million people had been displaced by the conflict (9 million internally). 12,000 people have been reported dead since April 2023, though this is likely a vast underestimate. According to a United Nations report seen by Reuters, 15,000 people were killed in one city in Darfur alone, in a re-enactment of the ethnic violence of the early 2000s. The culprits behind this are the now-rebranded RSF, but it is worth remembering their original name: the Janjaweed. The name literally translates as ‘devils on horseback’ – a description with which the people of Darfur, who faced genocide at their hands in 2003, would certainly agree.

Another reason to doubt the figures is the widespread practice of unofficial burials. Dallia Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese political commentator, spoke to me of ‘family and friends who have had to bury relatives in their gardens’. Health services have inevitably been hollowed out because of the war, in part because ‘the RSF has occupied a number of hospitals and used them for military purposes. Some hospitals have been shelled while others have been looted,’ as Sudanese writer and researcher Nada Wanni observed to me. Electricity blackouts have also meant ‘dialysis patients and many others have died in Khartoum and other states’. Wanni speaks of the ‘collapse of the medical sector’. This picture is corroborated by a Sudanese humanitarian worker to whom I spoke, who wishes to remain anonymous. This person told me of the extremely limited number of hospitals now in operation: for example, in the city of Omdurman, which has a population of over 2 million, only Al-Nau Hospital is still functioning.

In place of the government, so-called ‘resistance committees’ have taken up the responsibilities previously entrusted to the state. The committees first emerged during the 2019 revolution as grassroots organisations involved in rallying support for the peaceful protests against the regime of al-Bashir. Since the war began, they have been providing food and medical care to the needy, as well as safe passage for those seeking to flee Sudan. Despite this, the situation throughout the country is dire. The World Food Programme reports that ‘nearly 18 million’ are suffering from acute food insecurity across the country, with ‘nearly 5 million [facing] emergency levels of hunger.’ As defined by the United States Agency for International Development, the emergency level is phase 4 along the spectrum of food insecurity. Phase 5 is ‘catastrophe’.

In substituting for the state, the resistance committees have revealed the government’s inability to meet its most basic responsibilities. The rhetoric and actions of the government reflect a recognition of this reality. For instance, the governor of Sudan’s El Gezira state ordered ‘the detention of all members of the fifth column cooperating with the RSF militiamen, and which consists of displaced originally from Darfur and Kordofan, who entered El Gezira recently, members of the forces of the Freedom and Change Declaration, and of the resistance committees’. The Freedom and Change Declaration was drafted by the pro-democratic and anti-war coalition the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). For the SAF, the smearing of the FFC and resistance committees is a necessary part of their repression.

From the outset of the war, both the RSF and SAF have received foreign help. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been supporting the RSF directly in its war effort by sending arms shipments via Chad into Darfur. Hemedti’s family’s ownership of the Jebel Amir gold mines ensures that the UAE, as the primary recipient of this gold, continues to support the RSF. Meanwhile, Egypt supports the SAF, and so the civil war has become a war of proxies, with foreign governments competing for regional influence and natural resources. The significance of this is worth emphasising, given the limited capability of either the SAF or the RSF to wage a war on their own. Shayna Lewis, a Sudan specialist, went so far as to tell me that ‘if you removed the UAE from the conflict, there is a widespread feeling that the war would end.’

The prospects for peace are bleak, with no evidence to suggest that either side seeks a cessation of hostilities. The Economist’s striking November 2023 headline, ‘A genocidal militia is winning the war in Sudan’, continues to hold true in many respects. Meanwhile, Lewis told me, there are reports of a ‘great mobilisation in Eastern Sudan, with the SAF going on the counteroffensive and taking the fight to the RSF.’ This, she argues, will be devastating for the civilian population, as the SAF takes the war from east to west in an effort to regain lost territory. No doubt the SAF’s military planners have in mind the loss of confidence in them from the civilian population, a feeling produced by the incompetence and weakness of the army in the face of the RSF. The renewed ethnic killings in Darfur were a cruel reminder of this: despite the army possessing military bases in Darfur, Lewis argues that they ‘essentially abandoned the civilian population’.

What we are left with is a seemingly interminable and intractable conflict, one riven with the memories of a previous genocide. We are witnessing the death of a once-promising democratic revolution. Meanwhile, an indifferent world, which sees it as just another war in a benighted continent, watches on.

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