More than 80 Afghan women who fled the Taliban to pursue higher education in Oman are now at risk of having to return to Afghanistan following the Trump Administration’s sweeping cuts to foreign aid programs. The Afghan women were pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Oman as part of the Women’s Scholarship Endowment (WSE), a USAID program started in 2018, through which they could study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics–that is, the STEM disciplines banned to women by the Taliban. Now their scholarships have been frozen, driving these brilliant female students to utter despondency.
As the BBC reports, speaking anonymously for fear of repercussions, one of the women stated, “It was heartbreaking.” All of them were shocked and crying. “We were told we would be sent back within two weeks.”
In fact, the Taliban, which came to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, has imposed a series of restrictions and prohibitions on the activities carried out by women, mainly affecting education and freedom of speech and expression on all levels, including an outright ban on showing their faces in public.
The female students told the media that preparations are currently already underway to bring them back from Oman to Afghanistan and that they have appealed to the international community to “intervene urgently.”
“If they send us back, we will face serious consequences. That would mean losing all our dreams,” said one student. “We will not be able to study and our families may force us to marry. Many of us may also be at risk because of our experiences in activism in the past.”
Indeed, the Taliban have been repressing women protesting for the right to education and work, beating, arresting, and threatening many activists. The student went on to point out that in her country, “women describe themselves as ‘moving corpses’ under the brutal policies of the regime.”
