Thanks to peace, two unexpected words are echoing across Afghanistan's capital: Luxury housing
apnews.com
Afghans who spent years overseas are returning home, keen to take advantage of the country’s improved security.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — In a town that has been through it all and is clawing its way back, a man named Omidullah is looking to hit paydirt.

The Kabul real estate agent is selling a nine-bedroom, nine-bath, white-and-gold villa in the Afghan capital. On the roof’s gable, glittering Arabic script tempts buyers and brokers with the word “mashallah” — “God has willed it.”

The villa is listed at $450,000, a startling number in a country where more than half of the population relies on humanitarian aid to survive, most Afghans don’t have bank accounts, and mortgages are rare. Yet the offers are coming in.

“It’s a myth that Afghans don’t have money,” Omidullah said. “We have very big businessmen who have big businesses abroad. There are houses here worth millions of dollars.”

In Kabul, a curious thing is happening to fuel the high-end real estate market. Peace, it seems, is driving up property prices.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    15 days ago

    OK, so the Taliban literally have a history of selling women into slavery.

    Recent history.

    Now it is clear from the testimony of witnesses and officials of the new government that the ruling clerics systematically abducted women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic minorities they defeated. Stolen women were a reward for victorious battle. And in the cities of Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad and Khost, women victims tell of being forced to wed Taliban soldiers and Pakistani and Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, who later abandoned them. These marriages were tantamount to legalized rape. “They sold these girls,” says Ahmad Jan, the Kabul police chief. “The girls were dishonored and then discarded.”

    Also, child marriage is common practice:

    Half of all girls are married by the age of 15.

    If you can’t grasp the difference between how women are treated by the Taliban in Afghanistan and how they are treated in the US, then you aren’t qualified to have an opinion on this subject.

    The GOP’s policies in the US are oppressive and horrific, but they are still a very far distance away from actual state-sanctioned human trafficking.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      Again, the same happens here.

      We pretend slavery is okay because it’s people in prison being used as slave labor, and it’s constitutional.

      We also have child marriage. Another thing federal legislators couldn’t care less about.