Prominent Afghan women’s rights activist Zarifa Ghafari on Wednesday expressed her pain after fleeing her home country following the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban.
Ghafari, who previously served as mayor of the city of Maidan Shahr, landed at Cologne Bonn airport late on Monday after traveling from Afghanistan to Pakistan last week.
In an interview on Wednesday with The Associated Press, Ghafari spoke about the pain she felt as she and her family prepared to fly out of Kabul following a harrowing effort to reach the airport.
“I am not sure my tears will be able to explain it,” she said. “The fear, the feeling, the pain that I have and I had at the moment.”
She said the feeling was similar to the day she lost her father, who, she said, the Taliban killed last year.
"It was the pain that I was never imagining."
Ghafari was a shining example of the new Afghanistan that many of the nation's people hoped would emerge after years of Taliban rule: a young female mayor appointed in a country where women's rights were suppressed under the hardline Islamist group.
Now the 29-year-old is sitting in a German hotel after having fled her homeland along with thousands of other Afghans who fear the Taliban's renewed takeover puts their lives at risk.
She criticized the U.S. military pullout from Afghanistan after 20 years and the likely end of evacuations by the United States and others by August 31.
“It is the worst decision anyone can make," Ghafari said, adding that many Afghans who worked for the country's defeated government and foreign militaries will be at the mercy of the Taliban.
She now fears many Afghans who stood in the Taliban’s way will be targeted.
“(The) Taliban are searching for them and killing them one by one, house to house,” she said.
“They have a long list of blacklisted people and they are killing everyone.”
Ghafari dismissed the Taliban's public reassurances that they won't seek retribution but said she was willing to speak to its leaders, insisting they would never get Afghanistan to recover from two decades of war without bringing the country's women on board.
"You can't govern with 50% of the population of Afghanistan," she added.
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