Thank you.
I'm honoured to be part of this hearing, and I look forward to sharing my perspective from Afghanistan on what we have been going through.
I want to start with a small story from my experience. I work with a group of 200 women on a daily basis in Afghanistan. These are women peace-builders and women leaders—women who have not been in the media. These are the women who have actually stopped suicide bombers and worked with the mothers who stopped suicide bombers. These are the women who actually stopped madrasas from teaching suicide terrorism to kids, and these are the women who have gone to the Taliban jails and freed prisoners. So these are like women leaders in the provinces. I won't get into more details than that, due to concerns for their security.
The organization I run and its partnership with Canada have been waiting for so many years—at least the past six or seven years—in Afghanistan. There is one experience I would like to recall. Some Canadian military members wanted to talk to women to see how they could actually start looking at issues of women, peace and security, which is a Canadian mandate, but also as part of their engagement with Afghans. I took a group of 15 women in Kandahar by bus from the city to the airport so they could meet the members of the military. I won't go into further details. Imagine 15 women who took that risk, because going to a military airport was not just risking their lives but for a woman it was considered to be literally like prostitution, and she would literally have been stoned to death. But these women took the risk, because they were working with the mission that we needed to engage women in the security sector. That's what my organization focused on. Today, all 15 of those women are in Afghanistan and living in a very difficult situation, hiding from one province to the other.
For the past six years, through the Canada fund, my organization was able to get around 10,000 women into the Afghan police. We had a formal engagement with Canada and the Ministry of the Interior, and we got women into NATO training programs and also into the police forces. Canada has had a long-standing women, peace and security plan and mandate.
We thought this would actually continue, but I don't see what happened on August 15 as an isolated event. It didn't just happen overnight. I'm actually surprised when I hear officials and parliamentarians say that they were taken by surprise. Nobody listened to us women. We had been talking about it. We had been telling the policy-makers and the global leaders that things were going so wrong in Afghanistan and to please listen to the women and not to make deals with a group that excluded the Afghan government.
The Doha deal was the start of Afghanistan's political surrender. It was not August 15. It was the Doha deal that actually gave legitimacy to a group that did not even include the Afghan government as a signatory, and that was when things started getting much worse in local communities. As an organization working in the local communities, we started reporting on the fall of different districts and provinces, even right before August last year.
I would like to thank Canada for the announcement regarding the Afghan refugees. Some of my colleagues have made it to Canada after six or seven months of being in Albania, or having been evacuated directly from Kabul, so we are grateful for this big support, but at the same time I would also like to echo the concerns I heard from the previous panels in terms of the lack of response. My own parents had to wait for seven months, during which we never heard anything from IRCC about the status of their case.
I would also like to share the focus of the SIM, the special immigration program for Afghans. I would very much like the focus to expand beyond translators and also to see the number of women applicants, women leaders applicants...because in Afghanistan the translators have been mostly men with the military. It's important. I would very much ask for quotas and gender disaggregation, with the way Canada talks about women in leadership, as well as women, peace and security.
I come with—