Widows and destitutes take refuge

The first women settled on this stony slope outside Kabul in the 1990s hoping to escape the stigma they were 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 15 kilometres south-east of the capital has gradually been swallowed by the city, becoming a distant Kabul suburb. But for its residents, it remains “Zanabad”, the city of women.

The matriarch of Zanabad, Bibi ul-Zuqia, known as “Bibikoh”, died in 2016. 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, Ms. Azimi says, 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.

In Zanabad, Anissa says, land was cheap.

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,” says Ms. Azimi. “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.

Growing list

Bibikoh organised literacy classes, sewing workshops and food distributions with the support of an NGO, says 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. Alone, they are vulnerable.

A small military post guards the hill. It’s good for protection, Ms. Azimi says. The Taliban are not very far down the road.

Zanabad has been home to as many as 500 widows. Ms. Azimi 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.