Afghan Filmmaker Warns Of Upcoming Massacres, Child Brides, Banned Arts Amid Taliban Takeover
An Afghani filmmaker is warning of what is to come as a consequence of the Taliban taking over the country as the United States withdrew its forces.
Sahraa Karimi is the first and only Afghani female who has a Ph.D. in cinema and she is the general director of the Afghan Film Organization.
She made a social media post urging the international film community to speak up about protecting the people of Afghanistan.
“I write to you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers from the Taliban,” she wrote. “In the last few weeks, they have massacred our people, they kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men… It’s a humanitarian crisis, and yet the world is silent… They will ban all art. I and other filmmakers could be next on their hit list.”
Karimi also came out against the media as well as humanitarian groups who seem to have turned their backs on the suffering people of Afghanistan.
“We have grown accustomed to this silence, yet we know it is not fair,” Karimi wrote. “We know that this decision to abandon our people is wrong, that this hasty troop withdrawal is a betrayal of our people and all that we did when Afghans won the Cold War for the west.”
To All the #Film_Communities in The World and Who Loves Film and Cinema!
I write to you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers from the Taliban. #Share it please, don't be #silent. pic.twitter.com/4FjW6deKUi
— Sahraa Karimi/ صحرا كريمي (@sahraakarimi) August 13, 2021
The brave filmmaker also says that young girls who are of school age will be among those who will suffer the most under the Taliban’s rule.
“Our people were forgotten then, leading up to the Taliban’s dark rule, and now, after 20 years of immense gains for our country and especially our younger generations, all could be lost again in this abandonment.”
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