Meeting women's basic needs

Families at the Mar Garh camp, Afghanistan, received vital assistance from CAFOD and Islamic Relief [Marsha Pereira]

Two years after Taliban rule ended in Afghanistan, thousands of refugees - most of them women and children - returned to the war-ravaged country

Afghans began leaving their country in large numbers following the Soviet invasion of 1979. By the end of the 1980s there were around three million Afghan refugees in Iran and about the same number in Pakistan.

Afghanistan then suffered a severe four-year drought, leading to thousands more Afghans leaving their homes in search of food.

Recently, up to 1.7 million displaced refugees – mostly young women – have returned to their homeland, putting a strain on a country still recovering from war and drought.

Women and young girls are confronted with a multitude of threatening situations, such as lack of food supplies, healthcare and inadequate housing. CAFOD and Caritas are working with local partners to protect and rehabilitate some of these women.

Essential basics

A protection centre in Herat set up by CAFOD partner, the International Catholic Migration Commission, provides vulnerable women with basic but essential needs such as security, adequate food and water.

Sixteen-year-old Fatima and her fifteen-year-old sister, Gulnaz, lived with their parents in Iran as Afghan refugees, and were married off at the ages of thirteen and fourteen.

When their parents returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, the sisters were left behind. Badly treated by their husbands, the teenagers managed to escape and crossed the Iranian border, to arrive penniless, destitute and traumatised by their experiences. Thankfully, they were put in touch with the protection centre in Herat.

After a month of searching, the sisters’ parents were located in Mazar e Sharif and the girls now wait at the centre for their family to collect them.

Malika, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name, is the centre’s manager. She said: “Some women do not have parents or husbands and are lost, so we try to locate their relatives.”

At the centre, women and children can take literacy classes and learn skills to give them start on the path to their new lives. Malika added, “What these women desperately need is a sense of normality”.

This child now lives in a refugee camp in Pakistan. [CARITAS Internationalis]

Many women at the centre have harrowing stories to tell.

Ten-year-old Oobra came to the centre after she ran away from a forced marriage, while Maryam, a frail mother of a baby boy and a young daughter, was deported to Afghanistan by Iranian police after being found on the streets of Tehran. Her husband had divorced her after years of marriage and thrown her out of the house.

“Maryam is much better now than when she first arrived, when she was traumatised and in a state of shock,” said Malika.

Missing men

Afghans have been fighting a civil war for so long that many families lack male members.

Men have either been fighting, lost their lives in battle or, for those few Afghan men who moved away with their families, unable to work because of a lack of proper documentation or because they are physically disabled as a result of the war in their country.

Therefore, women are often the head of the household and the main breadwinners of their families.

With the support of CAFOD and Caritas, our local partner organisations are making sure that these refugee women's needs are recognised and addressed. This is a vital step in restoring some sense of normality to the wider Afghan population.

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