"Hat off to these women..very brave indeed! Women of Afghanistan, Canada supports yr fight for freedom, equality!"

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Afghan women protest restrictive law

The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.
"Get out of here, you whores!" the men shouted. "Get out!"
The women scattered as the men moved in.
"We want our rights!" one of the women shouted, turning to face them. "We want equality!"
The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides. "Whores!"

But the march carried on anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital yesterday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women and permits, among other things, marital rape.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women, most of them young, many in jeans, walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law's repeal. "Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse," said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. "It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."

The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, applies to the Shiite minority only, essentially giving clerics authority over intimate matters between women and men. Women here and governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law especially. One provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband's sexual advances. A second provision requires a husband's permission for a woman to work outside the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to "make herself up" or "dress up," if that is what her husband wants.

FISCHLER: Remarkable women in Afghanistan

300 of the bravest women I’ve ever heard of took to the streets to protest a terrible loss of their rights. They did it while a snarling, violent crowd of around 1,000 men - at least 3 times their number - called them “whores” and told them to get out of town.

THIS SCENE was remarkable because these women managed to march two miles to Parliament to submit a petition to repeal a law that places a number of Talibanish restrictions on women’s lives and even permits marital rape.

Yet, had any one of those 300 women been stoned or beaten to death by the raging male crowd, their lives would have been “legally” forfeited because of existing Islamic laws. These women knew this. They knew that each step they took could have been a step toward death. Yet they braved the possibility of death for two miles.

Family of slain Afghan woman attend her Toronto-area memorial

Sitara Achakzai, a dual German-Afghan citizen, spent the years of Taliban rule in Germany and returned to her native country five years ago to fight for women's rights. She’s a member of Kandahar's provincial council, was killed last Sunday when four gunmen on motorcycles opened fire as she got out of her car outside her home in Kandahar city. Qari Yousef Ahmedi, a Taliban spokesman, claimed responsibility for the attack.

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(Title from comment by MattMcrae on Afghan women pelted with stones during rape law protest)

Photos courtesy of Shah Marai / AFP / Getty Images and Musadeq Sadeq / AP

Original Source: Winston-Salem Journal, Daily Freeman, and CBCNews.ca