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Welcome to cryfreedom.net, formerly known as.Womens Liberation Front.  A website that hopes to draw and keeps your attention for  both the global 21th. century 3rd. feminist revolutution as well and a selection of special feminist artists and writers.

This online magazine will be published evey six weeks and started February 1st. 2019. Thank you for your time and interest.

Gino d'Artali
indept investigative journalist
and radical feminist

 

 

  

                             

 

      

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                                                                                                            CRYFREEDOM 2019/2020


<protester Munisa Mubariz pledged to continue fighting for women’s rights. <If the Taliban want to silence this voice, it's not possible. We will protest from our homes...
AUGUST 2022
27-31 August 2022
27-23 August 2022
 
14 and 19-13 August 2022
13-3 August 2022
 

'I will resist': Afghan female journalists defy taliban pressure.
JULY 2022
 

 

Click here for June untill January 2022

Click here for an overview of 2021

 
International media about atrocities
against women worldwide.

JULY 2022

19 - 11 July 2022
(incl. 28 June 2022 and
6 and 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2022

Click here for June untill January 2022

 INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY 2021

 

 

CLICK HERE ON HOW TO READ THE BELOW (updated 12 MAR 2022)

When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali

Al Jazeera
14 Aug 2022
LONG READ
Features|Women's Rights
By Robyn Huang
<< <I'll be sacrificed>: The lost and sold daughters of Afghanistan
Child marriage, lack of education, financial desperation – a year on from the Taliban takeover, what does the future hold for women and girls?
Herat, Afghanistan – The last time Aalam Gul Jamshidi saw her daughter was the night the 16 year old was married off to a man more than twice her age. Aziz Gul looked radiant in a sequinned, white wedding dress and a bright yellow headscarf, but there was fear in her otherwise solemn expressions. <If I go there, I'll be sacrificed,> her mother remembers her daughter pleading that night last October. Aalam Gul had a sinking feeling but convinced herself it was just nerves. Aziz Gul's marriage had been arranged four years prior and now that the time had come, she knew it was her duty to encourage her daughter into a new family. In Afghan culture, once a female marries, she moves in with her in-laws. Aziz Gul left her family’s home in Gozar Gah, a suburb of Herat, and moved to her new husband Musa’s home in Jawand, a rural district some 200km (124 miles) away – too far for her family to visit easily. Five months later, the phone rang. It was Musa's father calling to tell Aalam Gul that her daughter had been killed. Her naked body had been found in a forest just outside the village where she had lived with her in-laws. Aziz Gul had been beaten and shot four times in the back.
She was 17 years old and four months pregnant.
Aziz Gul's family – ethnic Jamshidi Aimaq, self-described Tajik Arabs – are originally from Badghis province. They moved to Herat during the height of the conflict between the previous government and the Taliban, which retook control of the country after United States and NATO forces withdrew in August 2021. Before the family left, when Aziz Gul was just 12, her parents agreed to marry her to Musa when she turned 16 – the minimum legal age for marriage in Afghanistan under the previous government. The Taliban has not mentioned whether that minimum age has changed. In exchange, her 26-year-old elder brother Aminullah would marry Musa's 18-year-old niece, Shakar. Across Afghanistan, it is common for children – particularly girls – to be married. Families arrange marriages to pay back personal debts, settle disputes, improve relations with rival families, or simply because they hope marriage will offer them protection from the worst extremes of economic hardship, and social and political upheaval. Though child marriage is not thoroughly tracked in Afghanistan, with gaps in concrete, holistic data about the number of children affected, UNICEF has reported children being sold as young as 20 days old for future marriage, with girls disproportionately affected. Now, amid spiralling poverty and the difficulty of finding sustainable jobs – only five percent of Afghan families have enough to eat daily, and inflation for essential household goods is at 40 percent (PDF) – even more families are struggling. Many are making desperate decisions to survive, including selling their children – specifically young daughters – into marriage or arranging their marriages in order to receive a dowry or mahr. The dowry, paid by the groom to the bride's family, is a traditional practice in all marriages in Afghanistan, but more families are now seeking this to help them survive difficult financial times.>>
Please do read all here even if it'll costs you time. I almost beg you to so and to honour Aziz Gul:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/14/ill-be-sacrificed-the-lost-and-sold-daughters-of-afghanistan
Also listen to the embedded audio

Al Jazeera
19 Aug 2022
By Kern Hendricks
<<Women working inside an Afghan chemical lab face uncertain future. At a fertiliser plant in Afghanistan's north, women work to support their families amid changes after Taliban's return.
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan – Arzoo Noori holds two glass vials, carefully pouring a clear liquid from one to the other. As she holds one beaker up to the light of the window, swirling it slowly, the solution begins to turn a shade of translucent pink. In the high-ceilinged room behind her, Noori and six of her colleagues – all women clad in spotless white laboratory coats and latex gloves – make notes on clipboards, adjust bunsen burners, and handle antiquated-looking measuring devices. Amidst the delicate clinking of glassware and the scribble of pencils, the room has an air of calm, quiet productivity. Noori, aged 30, is a lab technician at Afghanistan’s largest chemical plant, located outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh province. Slight of build and softly spoken, she exudes an air of confident professionalism as she moves between workbenches, deftly measuring out chemicals from bottles with peeling Russian labels. The factory, which produces urea fertiliser for Afghanistan’s agricultural sector, is a vestige of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Today the fertiliser comes packaged in freshly designed bags marked: Product of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Towering above lush green fields, the factory smokestacks, cooling towers, and rusting industrial facades are a stark contrast to the simple, single-story mudbrick homes that dot the surrounding landscape. Noori began working at the factory when she was 23 years old after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Balkh University. She started as a lab assistant and quickly worked her way up to become manager of the entire urea production laboratory. It was a position that she studied hard for and was proud to earn.
Yet soon after the Taliban retook control of the country last August, Noori was stripped of her role and the female staff were separated from their male colleagues. On an afternoon in March, Noori, engrossed in her work, is for the moment less interested in talking about these changes than in explaining the test that she and her colleagues are conducting. <This is a test to assess the pH balance of the water we use here at the factory,> she says without looking up from the beaker in front of her. <It’s a simple task – we only have to add a few chemicals to the water – but if we don’t monitor the pH balance, other processes in the factory will be affected.> Noori – one of nearly 200 women working in the factory – takes immense pride in her work. She knows she is a vital part of the factory. But now, working under the supervision of a man far less qualified than herself, Noori and many of her female colleagues wonder what the future holds for them – and for their careers – in the Taliban's Afghanistan.
Changes to women's jobs
One year since the Taliban regained full control of Afghanistan, the country remains in a fragile and impoverished state despite signi-ficant improvements to security. Climate change is wreaking havoc across the country – Afghanistan faces its worst drought in 27 years, and now has the highest level of emergency food insecurity of any nation on earth. A recent World Food Programme report projected that 22.8 million Afghans – roughly half of the country – faces severe food insecurity in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of families are now entirely reliant on the food provided by NGOs and the United Nations. Battered by the lasting effects of conflict, climate change, and international sanctions, Afghans also struggle to find any means of consistent income. Women have been hardest hit, with female employment expected to fall by 28 percent this year, according to the United Nations International Labour Organization. Against the backdrop of a humanitarian and economic crisis, the rights of Afghan women have also begun to erode. Many girls' high schools around the country remain closed, locking thousands out of an education that seemed within their grasp only 12 months ago. Across the country, many women, particularly those working outside the healthcare and education sectors, have lost their jobs, and now find themselves unable to secure any form of employment. Some remain at home simply out of fear of interacting with the Taliban. Others continue to attend their jobs but find their workplaces are now gender-segregated. Demonstrations in support of women’s rights have, on several occasions, been violently repressed, and many women remain fearful that advocating for their rights will result in harassment, arrest, or worse. Noori and her colleagues at the factory live in one of Afghanistan's least socially conservative cities and many of the women of Noori’s generation had some access to education and families who encouraged them to pursue their own careers as independent women. But when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, several of Noori’s older female colleagues worried that they might be barred from working at the state-owned plant. Previous Taliban rule
Zia Omar, 50, has worked as a lab technician at the factory for 35 years. Like many women of her generation at the factory, she was hired and trained by the Soviets during their decade-long occupation. A gentle woman with a ready laugh, Omar wears a pink hijab draped loosely over her hair and shoulders. With decades of experience, she can easily hold a conversation as she carries out her tasks. Omar says that she was forced to stop working under the previous Taliban government from 1996 to 2001. <They didn’t allow any women to work in the factory,> she says. <For almost six years I was stuck at home with no job.> When her husband's wage as an engineer at the factory proved too small to support the whole family, Omar decided she could contribute from home. She bought a sewing machine and spent the rest of the Taliban’s first rule tailoring clothes which her husband would then sell in the local bazaar.>>
Note from Gino d'Artali: I's indeed a <Long read> but please click here to read all:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/19/women-working-inside-an-afghan-chemical-lab-face-uncertain-future

Al Jazeera
17 Aug 2022
By Samira Sayed-Rahman
Samira Sayed-Rahman is a Canadian-born Afghan humanitarian worker.
<<Afghanistan’s crisis started well before August 2021
I worked for Afghanistan's government. Now I recognise we, too, bear responsibility for the country's struggles. On the morning of August 15, 2021, I boarded a 9am flight from Kabul to Istanbul, thinking I would be back at work in a few days’ time at the Afghan state-owned national utility company I called the office. When we landed in Istanbul late afternoon, the beeps and dings of cellphone notifications from people's devices were soon replaced by gasps and cries. Within seconds, I saw grown men and women fall to the airport floor in tears. While we were in the air, Afghanistan's elected leadership had fled and the Taliban had arrived in Kabul. I would eventually see images of Taliban fighters walking on the grounds of my old offices in the presi-dential palace. Everything I had spent the past seven years working towards unravelled in the time we were in the air. In the weeks and months prior, my colleagues and I were negotiating long-term power-purchase agreements and investments in Afghanistan's energy sector. We were discussing 10 and 25-year plans. We were developing stra-tegies to turn Afghanistan into a regional hub for connectivity. I belie-ved in a vision of a sustainable, self-reliant country if only the latest war would end. The war did end, but instead of connecting Asia with the world, Afghanistan — which sits at the heart of the continent — is now isolated. Its people are without money, jobs and increasingly food, a year after the Taliban came back to power. When I returned in March to a very different Kabul from the city that I had left last August, it was as a humanitarian worker no longer focused on long-term strategies but on programmes aimed at ensuring basic survival.
A country that has seen so many political upheavals over the last five decades is in a more dire situation than it has ever been. Still, the cessation of active warfare allowed me to travel to some of the most remote areas of the country that were difficult to access under the democratic governments before the return of the Taliban.>>
Read the very long story but very written complete opinion i.e. article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/8/17/afghanistans-crisis-started-well-before-august-2021

Al Jazeera
16 Aug 2022
By Durkhanai Ayubi and Mina Sharif
<<FORK THE SYSTEM
Features
Yearning for Afghanistan, in one meal Naan and kebab mean big family gatherings, laughter and joy. But for Afghan families torn apart by conflict, they bring bittersweet memories. One of our, all of our, fondest childhood memories is the aroma of homemade naan baking, filling our sparsely furnished diaspora homes with comfort. What we lacked in material possessions paled against the deeper nourishment of healing through food. Naan-e-Afghani (Afghan bread) is a huge part of our cuisine and sustenance, as plentiful as wheat is in Afghanistan – from the flaky, irresistible naan-e-roghani for break-fast to the round and oblong lavash breads studded with nigella and sesame seeds that accompany most meals. In the many naanwayis (bread bakeries) of Afghanistan, the flatbreads bake on the walls of traditional vertical tandoors until they become golden. The naanwahs (bakers) sit on platforms around the top of the tandoor, kneading and shaping the dough and passing it along to be plastered onto the hot tandoor walls for baking. With intuitive ease born of long experience, the naanwahs use a pointed metal rod to effortlessly peel the naan from the tandoor wall just at the point when it is slightly crusty on the outside, and soft and pillowy inside. Afghan naans are nearly always flatbreads, a simple mix of flour, water, oil, salt and leaven – kneaded into an elastic dough and left to rise before shaping and baking. If you are making flatter naans, you use less leaven, like a paratha, to make a runny dough that can be poured on a heated iron skillet. Naan was still an everyday thing to smell wafting through our refugee homes, baked in our mothers’ electric ovens, not in the tandoors of naanwayis. Kebab was not.
As children, helping our mothers marinate the pieces of chicken and lamb the night before an event carried with it a sense of excitement – knowing the next day meant a day trip or a back yard barbecue with family and friends. Kebab is a familiar word to many, and in Afghan cuisine, it has many variations – from skewers of meat cooked over hot coals to fried chapli kebabs that are common street food, to elongated shami kebabs, to kebab-e-degee, which is cooked in a pot. But it is not an everyday food. In a traditionally subsistence- and agriculture-based culture, meat was a rarity, to be eaten sparingly, on special occasions – without waste. Kebab is a treat to mark everything from birthdays to communal gatherings.
For us, they meant gatherings, marked by uncles in the back yards and parks of Australia and Canada flipping skewers and fanning coals as they discussed the dismal politics of the homeland.
What was 'home'?
We are two Afghan-born women who have lived for decades – since we were toddlers – as diaspora on opposite sides of the world. We are also cousins, who, like so many generations of Afghan families separated through unrest, have spent our lives apart.
Durkhanai, after spending time in a refugee camp in Pakistan, arrived in Melbourne, Australia with her nuclear family in 1987. From there, they moved to settle in the smaller town of Adelaide, where they connected with a small group of Afghan families arriving in Australia – that group has since grown. Mina arrived in Vancouver, Canada with her parents in 1984, a time before social media when the reality of displacement meant they had no way to know if they even had any family in Canada. Eventually, her grandparents, and many of her aunts, uncles, and cousins who left Afghanistan would move from various countries and settle near each other in Toronto. Our families became refugees during Afghanistan’s communist era when the Cold War struggle for global dominance between then-Soviet Russia and the United States unfolded as a great devastation – a spiritual and physical exile Afghanistan never completely recovered from with echoes that reverberate through to the present traumas in the country. On a collective level, the unrest led to a fragmentation of Afghan identity and a dilution of our intellectual histories and cultural knowledge. On an individual level, our displacement as children often presented itself as a <clash> of cultural norms, a challenge until we were better aware and able to reconcile these disparities in a way that led to a fuller sense of identity.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/8/16/yearning-for-afghanistan-in-one-meal
Note by Gino d'Artali: Tens of thousands found i.e. seek refuge again in the diaspora after the taliban took over control of Afghanistan again. What they have left are their memories and the traditional kitchen. For the ones left behind there's hunger, starvation and fear.

France 24
15 Aug 2022
By Tom Wheeldon
<<Afghan opposition 'very weak' despite mounting anger against Taliban.
One year after the fall of Kabul, many of the opposition commanders famous for their stand in Panjshir Valley remain exiled in Tajikistan. Analysts paint a picture of a weak armed resistance against the Taliban and an Afghan population that increasingly abhors the Islamic fundamentalist group but is too exhausted to oppose it. When Afghanistan captured the world's attention shortly after the Taliban's precipitous takeover on August 15, 2021, the media focused on the Panjshir Valley – where late Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud held off both the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. The lionised commander's son Ahmad Massoud vowed to fight the Taliban from Panjshir once again. But by September, Massoud had fled to neighbouring Tajikistan along with other resistance commanders. The apparent plan was to use Tajikistan as a staging ground to take on the Taliban. At the time, analysts lamented that it was a <non-viable prospect>. Since then, the few journalists with access to Panjshir have reported on common resistance attacks on Taliban positions. Washington Post journalists who visited Panjshir wrote in June that <residents say assaults on Taliban positions are a regular occurrence and dozens of civilians have been killed, with some civilians imprisoned in sweeping arrests>. Panjshir situation now ‘substantially different’. This situation makes a stark contrast to the state of play in Panjshir under Ahmad Shad Massoud – when the valley was the one holdout against Taliban during their first rule over Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. <It’s substantially different this time around,> said Omar Sadr, formerly an assistant professor of politics at the American University of Afghanistan, now a senior research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. <Panjshir is occupied,> Sadr went on. <At least Ahmad Shah Massoud could maintain a stronghold from which to resist the Taliban. Now the resistance is in the mountains; they don’t control the villages or the highways. That makes the task much more difficult in terms of the supply chains needed for fighting; it impacts upon the quality of the resistance.>. Looking at Afghanistan as a whole, the opposition is <very weak> , said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Security, Strategy and Technology. <In fact, it has turned out to be more feeble than many analysts expected.> The opposition has struggled to mobilise tribal support as well as to mount any significant operations,” Felbab-Brown continued. <There was quite a bit of expectation that this spring they would engage in attacks – but the Taliban has been able to effectively neuter them.> In this already difficult context, it was a strategic error for Ahmad Massoud and other resistance commanders to base themselves across the border, Sadr suggested: <The high-level leadership is in Tajikistan while the mid-level fighters are in Panjshir. Ahmad Massoud is a political leader, not much of a military leader – and it would have been much better if he and other senior figures could have joined the troops on the ground; it would have increased their legitimacy and boosted morale.>

'More radical and more repressive'

When the Taliban seized Kabul last year they tried to present themselves a reformed, more moderate successor to the outfit that brutally ruled Afghanistan two decades ago – the notorious <Taliban 2.0> narrative. The Islamic fundamentalists soon revealed <Taliban 2.0> to be nothing but a propaganda tool. In doing so, they alienated swathes of Afghan society and ensured that vehement anti-Taliban sentiment is by no means confined to the Panjshir Valley, Sadr noted. <You can see this Taliban 2.0 business is not true – look at the way they’ve put in place political and economic discrimination of non-Pashtuns, they’ve banned girls' education, they carry out extrajudicial killings,> he put it.>>
Read more here:
https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20220815-afghan-opposition-very-weak-despite-mounting-public-anger-against-taliban
Opinion by Gino d'Artali: Mr. Felhab-Brown really is overlooking and even insults the Afghanistan's Women Resistence Actions and the Women standing up against the taliban!

The Guardian
15 Aug 2022
By Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
<<'I daren't go far': Taliban rules trap Afghan women with no male guardian.
Hasina* cannot send her two daughters to school, because they are teenagers and high school is banned for girls in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But she cannot take them out of the country to finish their education because she is a divorced single mother, and women are barred from long-distance travel without a male 'guardian' to escort them. Wazhma* lies awake worrying what she will do if her sick, elderly mother needs emergency medical help at night. Her father is dead, she is unmarried and her teenage sister is disabled.
She is terrified that as women out alone at night, even on their way to a hospital, they would be stopped and harassed by the Taliban.
Most Afghan women have had to learn to endure new restrictions and controls over the last year, but there is one group whose lives have been particularly curtailed. Women who live in households without a close male relative, whether through tragedy, circumstance or choice, now exist in a legal limbo, because they do not have a close male relative to act as a mahram, or 'guardian'. In the Taliban's extremist reimagining of Afghanistan, women are not fully autonomous citizens of their own country. Instead a man is deemed responsible for their presence in public, including how they dress and where they travel.
Officially, any woman travelling more than 75km (46 miles) or leaving the country needs a mahram. If a woman is found to have broken the Taliban’s dress codes, their male relatives face punishment. The rules have been enforced sporadically, with some officials turning a blind eye to solo travel. Raihana* was barred from boarding a plane earlier this year for a work trip but says women have since been allowed back in the air alone.
....
But many others across Afghanistan have reported restrictions on women's movements that go far beyond the official regulations. They told the Guardian that Taliban fighters have barred them from even short journeys, including commuting to work, sometimes using indirect tactics such as threatening drivers who take solo female passengers. Health workers said they had personal experience of women being barred from accessing medical help without a mahram in at least two districts, one in central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province and one in southern Helmand. These extreme controls fuel the fears of women such as Wazhma, even about journeys that should be legal, like taking her mother to hospital in Kabul. She used to have a senior government job, travelling abroad and extensively across Afghanistan. Since the Taliban ordered most female civil servants to stay away from work and then advised women not to leave home except in cases of necessity, she can count on her hands the number of times she has left her own neighbourhood. <Because of my mother's situation I want to take her abroad to a better hospital, but I don't dare to. I know that if I travel far they are likely to stop me,> she said, adding that she found the situation unbearable. <I can't tolerate this. I am a person who studied and worked all these years, now an illiterate man can stop me, ask questions, argue with me, and I cannot argue with him.> >>
Read all here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/15/taliban-rules-trap-afghan-women-no-male-guardian

Al Jazeera
13 Aug 2022
<<Taliban disperses Afghan women's march for 'work and freedom'
Female demonstrators carrying a banner that read 'August 15 is a black day' demand rights to work and political participation.
Taliban fighters beat female protesters and fired into the air on Saturday to dispersed a rare rally in the Afghan capital, Kabul, days before the first anniversary of the group's return to power. About 40 women marched on the education ministry in Kabul, chanting <bread, work and freedom>. Despite the pledges made when it retook power, the Taliban has limited Afghan women’s rights, including keeping high school girl students out of school.
Some protesters who took refuge in nearby shops were chased and beaten by Taliban fighters with their rifle butts, according to the AFP news agency. The demonstrators carried a banner, which read <August 15 is a black day> as they demanded rights to work and political participation. <Justice, justice. We're fed up with igno-rance,> they chanted, many not wearing face veil. <Unfortunately, the Taliban from the intelligence service came and fired in the air,> said Zholia Parsi, one of the organisers of the march. <They dispersed the girls, tore our banners and confiscated the mobile phones of many girls.> But protester Munisa Mubariz pledged to continue fighting for women’s rights. <If the Taliban want to silence this voice, it's not possible. We will protest from our homes,> she said. Some journalists covering the demonstration – the first women's rally in months – were also beaten by the Taliban fighters, an AFP correspondent saw.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/13/taliban-disperse-rare-womens-protest-in-kabul
3 video's embedded
 

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