Afghan women lawyers on the run face life in limbo abroad

Afghan women lawyers on the run face life in limbo abroad

ATHENS: When the Taliban seized Afghanistan, lawyer Bibi Chaman Hafizi heard the militants were going door to door, hunting for people who worked for the state, so she burned every document in her home and went into hiding. Then she fled the country. Like dozens more women working in the legal sphere, Hafizi, who handled cases for the Counter Narcotics Justice Centre, was chased out of Afghanistan by the men they had jailed, now freed from prison by the insurgents. "When the Taliban came, we felt fear," she said, sitting in a bare-bones apartment in the Greek capital. "That if we fall into the hands of the Taliban, they will kill us." Hafizi was on the run for seven weeks with her journalist husband and their two children, moving between four cities before being evacuated to Greece with 25 more women judges and lawyers and their families. Now they are stuck in limbo, without work and only a few belongings, and face months of bureaucracy before reaching their final destination elsewhere in Europe. "The women who worked in the pursuit of justice are now trapped in their homes," she said. Afghan women made great strides in the two decades since