Members of the Afghan all-girls robotics team work with their robot in the practice area between 2017 FIRST Global Challenge competitions in Washington, DC.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Some members of the celebrated all-girls Afghan robotics team that in recent years made headlines as a symbol of a more progressive Afghanistan have escaped the country in the wake of the Taliban seizing control.
Members of the team called the Afghan Dreamers left Kabul on a commercial flight on Tuesday and are now in Qatar, according to Afghan tech entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who started the Afghan girls robotics team in 2017. Mahboob heads the Digital Citizen Fund, which runs classes for girls in STEM and robotics.
Video screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET
“The Taliban have promised to allow girls to be educated to whatever extent allowed by Shariah law,” Mahboob said in a statement obtained by The New York Times. “We will have to wait and see to what that means. Obviously, we hope that women and girls will be allowed to pursue dreams and opportunities under the Taliban, because that is what is best for Afghanistan and in fact the world.”
The girls who fled will remain in Qatar to continue their education, Mahboob said, while others plan to stay in Afghanistan, at least for now.
On Sunday, New York-based international human rights lawyer Kimberley Motley described what the girls were experiencing amid the panic and uncertainty of the Taliban takeover.
“These girls are extremely terrified,” Motley told the Canadian Broadcast News. “They’re in Herat, where now in the universities, they’re turning girls away. They’re telling girls, ‘Don’t come back to the university.’ Women are showing up for work and are being turned away. They’re seeing this and watching tearfully as their city is crumbling.”
The Taliban captured the girls’ hometown of Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city and a strategic provincial capital, as fighters approached the capital of Kabul. Taliban fighters took control of Kabul on Sunday, all but officially sealing their takeover of the whole country. This NBC video shows members of the militant group rushing past Herat’s historic blue mosque toward government buildings.
Members of the team, who range in age from 12 to 18, have overcome war and other hardships to pursue their love of engineering and robotics and strike a blow for gender equality and national pride.
This CNET video shows them accepting the silver medal for “courageous achievement” at an 2017 international robotics competition. Other teams had four months to build their robots, but the team from Afghanistan, twice denied visas into the US until a late intervention by the Trump administration, had only two weeks to build and ship their ball-sorting bot to Washington, DC.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the team worked on a low-cost ventilator using old car parts. The design, inspired by work on an emergency ventilator out of MIT, is low-tech so it can be replicated around the world with local products. For that contribution the team made Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list this year. The list honors trailblazers who exemplify determination, hard work and innovation.
Motley has worked in Afghanistan since 2008, successfully handling criminal and civil cases there. She says she fears for the young roboticists’ futures now that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country, leaving the Taliban in power and parts of the country in panic and chaos. The girls have expressed a desire to continue their education in Canada and Motley has been working to make that happen. Their plight has even spawned a Change.org petition calling for their safe resettlement there.
“Unfortunately, what’s been happening to little girls over this last week is that the Taliban has literally been going from door to door and taking girls out and forcing them to become child brides,” Motley said. “We are very, very concerned of that happening with this Afghan Girls Robotics Team, these girls that want to be engineers, they want to be in the AI community. They dare to dream, to succeed.”
As my CNET colleague Katie Collins reports, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen has over the past several days taken to Twitter to say Taliban soldiers have been ordered not to enter people’s homes and has called reports that soldiers are forcing young girls into marriage as “poisonous propaganda.” The story Shaheen is telling on Twitter is at odds both with news reports from the ground in Afghanistan and the fear expressed by Afghan citizens.
“We are deeply worried about Afghan women and girls, their rights to education, work and freedom of movement,” the White House said in a statement released Wednesday. “We call on those in positions of power and authority across Afghanistan to guarantee their protection.”