Manizha Bakhtari is on a mission to indicate that resisting the Taliban doesn’t imply “wanting a conflict” once more in her dwelling nation. Because the final serving feminine ambassador from Afghanistan anyplace on this planet, she is on the forefront of efforts to disclaim the Islamist group the worldwide recognition it badly craves.
The UN nonetheless refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the Taliban regime in Kabul, in place since Nato forces withdrew from the nation and the final democratically elected authorities collapsed in August 2021. Particular person international locations are following the UN’s lead, however many now host Afghan diplomatic missions led by Taliban appointees, usually out of practicality fairly than ideology.
Austria, the place Bakhtari leads the Afghan embassy, has held agency. And from there, Bakhtari is making an attempt to unfold the message throughout Europe that it might be a mistake to recognise or take care of a Taliban regime that fosters extremism and denies ladies lots of the most elementary rights.
Her story has began gaining consideration, and is now the topic of an 80-minute documentary entitled The Final Ambassador that obtained a standing ovation finally month’s Copenhagen Worldwide Documentary Movie Competition. It follows her journey from being first appointed as envoy to Austria by the earlier Ashraf Ghani-led administration to her current standing as head of a mission disowned by Kabul. It additionally reveals her actions operating secret courses for Afghan ladies banned by the Taliban from attending college.
In an interview with The Unbiased at a convention on Afghanistan’s future hosted by Madrid earlier this 12 months, Bakhtari explains what resistance means for her.
“Resisting the Taliban doesn’t imply that I need conflict in Afghanistan,” she says. “That’s what number of politicians deal with us on this world, imagine me – they see [the word] resistance they usually’re like ‘you’re warlords and also you need one other conflict in your nation’. It is vitally painful, you realize, as a result of resistance doesn’t imply to take [up] arms once more. It means to face in opposition to injustice.”
The Taliban has achieved its finest to eliminate important voices from the earlier administration and, like in lots of international locations, it issued a diktat firing Bakhtari shortly after capturing Kabul. However Austria nonetheless recognises her accreditation, so she continues to characterize the pursuits of Afghan nationals within the nation.
“I’m not taking orders from them – Taliban males,” she says. “My legitimacy will not be coming from the Taliban approval. No matter they are saying, no matter their rule, it’s their downside. Not mine. I don’t have to just accept their phrases as a result of they haven’t been recognised inside and out of doors of Afghanistan. They don’t even have legitimacy amongst our personal folks.”
Over the previous 4 years, Taliban representatives have steadily taken over an increasing number of missions world wide, with Norway the most recent European nation to just accept an appointee from the group final month. India held out till the tenure of the final Afghan ambassador reached its time restrict, after which quietly ushered in an official agreeable to the Taliban in late 2023. And the Afghan embassy within the UK was closed in September 2024, on the request of the British authorities, after the Taliban sacked all its workers.
Requested whether or not it’s inevitable that overseas governments might be pressured to take care of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, Bakhtari is adamant. “Let’s neglect the truth that the Taliban have been a terrorist group and put it apart, as a result of proper now the worldwide neighborhood desires everybody to neglect this,” she says,
“What about their insurance policies in the present day? Not 20 years again – let’s consider the previous 4 years – forgetting their suicide assaults and atrocities. What have the Taliban achieved for the prosperity and welfare of Afghans? Jobs? Revered primary human rights? Overlook about ladies’ training for a second. What about boys’ training? What are our boys learning?” the ambassador asks.
“They don’t have correct training or educated academics. The Taliban have lengthy altered the curriculum and are instructing regressive topics to thousands and thousands of Afghan boys who earlier studied beneath working Afghan ladies. So yeah, I’m not taking orders from those that are but to be recognised by even one authority,” she says.
Although Bakhtari is the one feminine Afghan ambassador nonetheless standing, she will not be alone as a lady working by diplomatic channels for the pursuits of the previous Afghan republic. On the Herat Safety Dialogue in Madrid, The Unbiased additionally met Nigara Mirdad, deputy head of mission on the now shut-down embassy of Afghanistan in Poland.
Mirdad was in hospital in September final 12 months together with her 11-year-old daughter, who has diabetes and wanted insulin, when the ambassador knowledgeable her that their Warsaw mission was being closed. She says she tried to battle again however in useless, and with none funds coming in from Kabul, she appealed to the diplomatic missions in Canada, Germany and the UK to assist her pay for fuel within the bitter sub-zero Polish winter.
She remembers the way it felt when she watched TV protection of the Taliban sweeping Kabul in 2021. “I didn’t eat for days and the tears wouldn’t cease rolling down my face,” she says.
Each Mirdad and Bakhtari knew what was coming for Afghan ladies beneath Taliban rule – the identical horror they endured as younger ladies of their early twenties.
In 1996, when she was simply 12 years previous, Mirdad remembers, Taliban militants entered the Panjshir valley and her neighbourhood ready to battle. “Folks mentioned women and girls must be killed and thrown within the rivers to stop the Taliban from touching them, and the Afghan males ought to go and battle the Taliban. And from that point, it stayed in my thoughts – if the Taliban comes nearer, me and the ladies of my household might be killed and thrown within the river,” she says.
Like Bakhtari, she has obtained threats from the Taliban in recent times. “I obtained many messages from the Taliban supporters and even the spokesperson of the Taliban’s inside affairs ministry after they got here to energy. He mentioned: ‘OK, you wait after we take all of the embassies in Europe, we are going to see you’,” she says.
Bakhtari says ladies like them are seen by the Taliban as a “risk to their management”. “They hate ladies. [They] worry that educated and empowered ladies will confront them and the constructions of oppression they’ve constructed. With training, with empowerment and with the ruling society, ladies will query them,” she says.
She says ladies can’t afford to surrender their nation, or the concept that issues can change. “We can’t afford to lose hope,” she says. “That’s the solely factor protecting thousands and thousands in Afghanistan alive.”
