A year after the Taliban re-took control of Afghanistan the eyes of the world have largely turned away and focused instead on other places and other problems such as Covid, the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis which has seen inflation sky-rocket in almost every country in the world.
But the Afghan people have not been able to turn away. The last year has taken a terrible toll on that country with hard-won rights for women and girls – basic things such as the right to an education and the right to be able to work – disappearing under the rule of the Taliban.
The economy has collapsed and people are starving, prompting the UN to describe the situation in Afghanistan as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Fatema Mohammadi has been living in Ireland since the start of this year. She was forced to flee Afghanistan because her role as an aid worker for NGOs made her a target for the Taliban. The 31 year old is currently teaching English to Ukrainian refugees in Ireland.
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She talks to the In The News podcast about the realities on the ground for the people of her homeland and details just some of the horrors people there are forced to contend with.
Colin P Clarke is a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, an independent non-profit organization offering research, analysis, and strategic dialogue on global security challenges and foreign policy issues, with a particular focus on counterterrorism, violent extremism, armed conflict.
He spent time serving on a counter-corruption taskforce in Kabul in 2011. and has been following the implosion of Afghanistan over the past 12 months. He paints a very bleak picture of the state of Afghanistan today and is gloomy about its prospects for recovery under the Taliban – an organisation he says has changed little since the dark days of the 1990s when it first seized power.
