The first women settled on the stony slope outside Kabul in the 1990s hoping to escape the stigma those like them are forced to endure.
Today it is known as Afghanistan’s “hill of widows,” home to a cluster of women who have eked out independence in a society that shuns and condemns them as immoral.
The rocky summit 15km southeast of the capital has gradually been swallowed by the city, becoming a distant Kabul suburb.
Photo: AFP
However, for its residents, it remains Zanabad, the city of women.
The matriarch of Zanabad, Bibi Ul-Zuqia, known as “Bibikoh,” died last year.
Her eldest daughter, 38-year-old Anissa Azimi, has a husband — but in a rare step for married women in conservative Afghanistan, has taken up the matriarchal torch.
Their house is one of the first when you arrive in Zanabad by a broken track, at the bottom of a passage barred with a tarp to protect privacy.
“My mother arrived here 15 years ago” with her five children, Anissa said, sitting on carpets and assaulted by a swarm of children.
Bibikoh lost a first husband, killed by a rocket, before being remarried to a brother-in-law, who then died from an illness.
She was scratching a living doing laundry for others, but found Kabul rents too expensive.
Land was cheap in Zanabad, Anissa said.
The first widows had already begun to lay down their belongings and their grief in the largely deserted suburb to form a tightly-knit community — though no one any longer knows exactly who began it, and when.
“They encouraged the others [widows] to join them,” Anissa said. “The main idea was to get a cheap and safe place ... a permanent address.”
Soon it became a haven for destitute and desperate women who had lost their husbands.
Bibikoh organized literacy classes, sewing workshops and food distributions with the support of a non-governmental organization, said researcher Naheed Esar, who studied the community for several years for the Afghan Analysts Network.
Women are perceived as being owned by their father before becoming their husband’s property. Widows are often rejected as immoral or regarded as burdens: They suffer violence, expulsion, ostracism and sometimes forced remarriage, often with a brother-in-law, as reported by the UN Mission in Afghanistan in a rare study published in 2014.
It is estimated there are as many as 2.5 million widows in Afghanistan. Often uneducated and cloistered at home, the women have few options if their husbands die.
At best, they receive US$150 per year from the government if their husband was killed in fighting. They survive by doing household chores, a little sewing, or by sending their children to beg in the bazaar.
“In Afghanistan, men usually provide financial support for women, so it is hard for women to lose this support,” Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs spokeswoman Kobra Rezai said.
A policy providing aid for poor women was approved in 2008, but never ratified, she added.
Sixteen years after the end of the Taliban regime, families are bereaved every day by an intensifying conflict. Zanabad has been home to as many as 500 widows. Anissa is trying to keep the list up to date, but as insecurity spirals more and more displaced families are seeking refuge in the outskirts of Kabul.
“Everywhere there is war. People are joining us,” she said.
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