More than 100 Afghan women threw off their burqa veils Tuesday for a symbolic march through the Afghan capital to demand respect for women`s rights after the callapse of the Taliban regime.
They included former politicians, academics, activisits and teachers who had been confined indoors or forced to wear the hated burqa veil in public for the past five years.
"You are the heroic women of Kabul," organiser Soraya Parlika told the group before they set off on a bare-faced march through the capital.
"You have been imprisoned in your own homes, you have been beaten, you have been deprived of work and forced to beg, but you stood firm and you should be called heroes. "Now it`s time to fight for your rights."
The Taliban evacuated Kabul a week ago in the face of heavy US air strikes and opposition ground attacks, ending their hardline Islamic rule condemned around the world for its treatment of women.
To uphold a misguided notion of women`s "honour", females were denied education and banned from all work except in the health sector. They could not leave their homes without a burqa -- covering their faces in a cloth mesh -- and could not travel without a close male relative.
In the last months of the Taliban`s radical Islamic regime here, leader Mullah Mohammad Omar even issued a decree banning women from attending picnics, deemed a sinful pleasure with no place in Islam.
But hopes are high that with the collapse of the Taliban a new constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women will be drawn up ahead of the creation of a broad-based, multi-ethnic government. Bureau Report