Taliban Religious Rules Leave Children Alone In Orphanage Women Who Once Cared For Orphans Forced To Stay Home

Parwaneh is barely 7 years old, but she has a lot of grown-up chores to do at the orphanage in the beleaguered Afghan capital.

Since the arrival of the Taliban religious army in Kabul more than two weeks ago, the older of the 500 children left at the orphanage have had to take care of the younger ones.

The women who once fed and cared for them are being kept away by the new rulers, whose strict version of Islam won’t let women work outside the home.

With a chubby 2-year-old propped on her tiny hip, Parwaneh carefully descended the dirty cement stairs to a communal bathing area, where she scrubbed her new charge.

“I have to take care of the babies, because we have no one to take care of them,” she said.

Life in Kabul has changed drastically since the Taliban took over on Sept. 27. In addition to being kept from work, women have been forced to cover themselves from head to toe. Schools for girls have been closed and men, forced to wear beards, have been dragged off the streets for prayers.

The Red Cross is negotiating with the Taliban, who control roughly two-thirds of Afghanistan, to let women return to work in the capital.

Until then, the children without parents will take care of themselves.

Parwaneh shares her dormitory-style room at the four-story brick orphanage with about a dozen other girls between 11 and 16 years old.

Lunch of broth and bread is served in a large, dark dining hall, where the only light comes from a tiny window high above the old wooden tables and benches.

On the wall outside, children using black chalk have drawn a helicopter dropping bombs. Nearby, there is a child’s drawing of a Kalashnikov rifle with a tank next to it. There is nothing more.

“Everything is in disarray,” said Mirza Mir Bhaluli, the deputy director of the orphanage, which was home to about 900 children before the Taliban arrived.

“I don’t know what to do. We need women to take care of these children,” he said. Women made up more than 85 percent of his staff.

But the women of Kabul are afraid, for the Taliban fighters have been uncompromising.

And the Taliban doesn’t seem to realize that education for boys also will suffer in Kabul, where 70 percent of the teachers were women.

“We don’t even have teachers for these children,” said Bhaluli.

About 400 orphans were removed after the Taliban victory by family members who had left them there, hoping the state could give them what they couldn’t - most notably an education.

“Some of their guardians were so unhappy with the conditions that they decided they could care for these children better than we could,” said Bhaluli.

One elderly woman, who has cared for the orphans through the worst factional fighting in the Afghan capital, has defied the Taliban edict.

“I am afraid of no one,” she said, stroking the head of a tiny boy. “How will I answer to God if I leave these small children, who have no one? They can’t run away. They are helpless.”