One Year After Leaving Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi Is Determined To Go Back

One year ago today, Fawzia Koofi, the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament and one of a few women involved in the intra-Afghan Peace Talks, left Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover.

At the time, Koofi was under house arrest in Kabul and it was becoming clear that her safety was in jeopardy. A single mother of two, she also wanted to ensure her daughters were safe.

Koofi says she left with the belief that she’d be back in Afghanistan within a few months’ time, but one year has passed and she has not been able to return home. She gets emotional when talking about it:

One year after the takeover, Koofi took some time to reflect on the situation in her country. She discusses what she’d like the international community to do to help Afghanistan, and, more specifically, to help Afghan women and girls.

One Year in Exile

Fawzia Koofi began her political career in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban when she started working on promoting girls’ education. She eventually joined Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, as a human rights advocate. She was elected in 2005 at the Afghan National Assembly and later on became the first female Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament in the history of Afghanistan. Her work and activism, as well as her outspokenness, made her the target of the Taliban.

She has faced the specter of death many times in her life, starting from the day she was born. Born into a polygamous family, her mother had wanted a boy to carry on the legacy of the family name. Disappointed with Koofi’s gender, she was left to die under the blazing heat of the sun hours after her birth. Her political activism also made her a target of the Taliban and she survived many assassination attempts throughout her life. These experiences have not only shaped her character but have impacted the way she thinks of peace and security.

Koofi has had to fight for almost everything in her life, including an education. She remembers having to convince her brothers to let her go to school. Girls’ education is in jeopardy once again under the renewed Taliban rule. Last March, the Taliban banned girls’ access to secondary school. According to Education Cannot Wait, a global U.N. fund for education, an estimated 8 million school-aged children need urgent support to access education. ‘’I’m hoping that we will mobilize more Islamic scholars In support of Afghan women to counter the Taliban narrative,’’ she said.

Starting in 2018, Koofi was part of the 21-member delegation of intra-Afghan talks with the Taliban. The talks ultimately did not succeed, but Koofi wishes to see more space for women in Afghanistan and wants more female voices involved in shaping the debate on the future of the country. ”Afghanistan was the only country represented by two flags [at the time]: One was the Taliban flag in the office in Doha, Qatar, and the other was the Republic flag,’’ she said, ‘’so they should give the same space to the women of Afghanistan, the political community of Afghanistan.”

The U.N. General Assembly

World leaders will soon be setting the diplomatic agenda for the year to come at the U.N.General Assembly high-level debate, which will commence on Sept. 20th.

While the war in Ukraine will be at the top of the agenda, Koofi hopes to see some progress or at least some debate around the situation in Afghanistan.

Since the takeover, the United Nations has still not granted the Taliban government the approval to represent the country at the world body. Representatives from the former government still technically speak on behalf of the country at the U.N. However, these Afghan diplomats are with very limited resources and their situation in New York City has become hard to sustain. Many top-level officials in the United States have moved on to better, paid jobs.