(IPS) feature ''If you are unable to stretch your food supply from noon to evening, what do you do?" asks Shahrukh, a 40-year-old Afghan mother of 11 who begs to help her family survive from day to day.

Shahrukh, who lost her husband in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, lives in a slum on the outskirts of Pakistan's capital Islamabad. The garbage that her two elder sons collect does not fetch enough money to buy food for the family and medicines for a sick daughter.

In the hut next to hers live 60-year-old Safia Bibi and her four teenage daughters, who have had no food this afternoon. "I was sick and couldn't go to collect alms, and we have no other source of income," she says.

Safia has few options left to her. Her husband fought against the Russians and lost both arms in a landmine explosion. She does not send her three daughters out to beg for fear of harassment by men.

"We know Afghan women who were schoolteachers and are begging in streets and their children collect garbage," says Saima Karim, spokesperson of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (Rawa).

Easy victims

Women like Sharukh and Safia are among those who fled persecution under the Taliban, which took power amid the internecine fighting among rival Afghan groups in 1996 and came to symbolise the violation of the rights of women they barred from most work, education and productive livelihood under an extremist band of Islamic rule.

But the Taliban only tops the list of Afghan warring factions that have persecuted women, activists say, because even the Northern Alliance has had its share of abuses during the fighting among Afghan groups in the years before the Taliban took control.

As Human Rights Watch has documented, a number of the United Front's factions were responsible for rapes during fighting in Kabul neighbourhoods in 1993 and 1995. It also documented in 1998 that violence against women was carried out by various warring factions, and in particular by the Taliban, to punish perceived opponents.

''Women had been the first easy victims of the 'jihadist' and Taliban traitors, so it's their obligation to be the first dagger in the heart of the fundamentalists,'' says an activist with Rawa, which formed in 1977.

Fatana Gillani of the Afghan Women Council related: ''Many Afghan women were dishonoured during Rabbani's regime when 'jihadist' commanders raped them indiscriminately. Then came the Taliban, who put the economic squeeze on them. Soon, morality went out the window. Today, the more vulnerable a woman, the more likely she is to sell her body.''

The need for deep reforms

The past travails of Afghan women give rise to concerns about their role in a post-Taliban set up - amid ongoing negotiations that involve tribal leaders - and underscores the need for deeper reforms that many say should now include a commitment from all factions to drop policies unduly restrictive to women.

Thus, while the fall of Kabul to Northern Alliance this month might provide temporary relief to Afghan women because the Alliance did not want to offend international opinion, there is still a long way to go before the end of their sufferings.

''It is an obvious fact that fundamentalists of all types use the name of Islam to justify and legitimise their violent madness,'' Marian, an activist of Rawa, said in an interview.

To have real change in society, she says, Rawa favours a clear separation between religion and politics in running Afghan affairs. ''Rawa stands for a separation of religious and political processes in Afghanistan, although the fanatical groups label secularism as a 'communistic' idea and term it a 'faith of the infidels'.''

From persecution to desperation

During Afghan's two decades of war, many Afghan women, who make up almost half of the country's some 22 million people, have joined the exodus of refugees.

A good number found their way to Pakistan. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) figures, for instance, a little more than 10,000 Kabuli women crossed into the Pakistani border town of Peshawar between Oct 1996 and Feb 1997 alone, and many morehave arrived since then.

Bilquis Makez, an Afghan intellectual and writer, estimates that 80 percent of Kabul's women have ended up in Peshawar. She said, ''I know many of them who beg only on Thursdays, when the faithful Muslims are more inclined toward giving alms. On other days they work as maid and servants.''

Being in Pakistan also brought little respite because the women were not given the status of refugees by Islamabad - Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on refugees.

While being refugees ''helped them escape a country torn apart by war, at the same time it has aggravated the conservative tendencies which controlled their lives in Afghanistan, made them dependent on strangers and curtailed their independence,'' explains Bushra Asif of the Islamabad-based Sustainable Policy Development Institute, who recently concluded a study on Afghan refugee women.

''These women have had to bear a heavier burden because of material difficulties, an alien environment and the disintegration of accustomed networks of social relationships,'' Asif said. ''Cultural constraints have been intensified in the refugee setting and have restricted freedom of movement and given society the opportunity to control women's lives.''

Post trauma stress

Women like Saira (not her real name) continue to live with the trauma she experienced not only under Taliban rule, but even in Pakistan.

Saira, one among 80 women at a shelter run by the Rawalpindi-based NGO Sach, was a teacher in Afghanistan when Taliban came to power. After the family fled to Pakistan, her husband forced her to become a prostitute. Later, he abandoned her and took away their three children.

Unable to handle her hysteria and aggression, the hospital staff contacted the police. Later on, Sach members gather from the brief account that Saira has given them, that she was raped in police custody before being sent to a government-run shelter.

According to Dr Rizwan Taj, a psychiatrist in Islamabad's Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences who has treated more than 1,000 Afghan women, most suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"Sufferers of PTSD live in a state of constant nervous tension, experience vivid flashbacks in daydreams and nightmares that leave themparalysed with terror. The condition can be permanently debilitating unless intense psychological counselling is provided," Taj opined.

These have their roots in the restrictive environment that Afghanistan has been. Under Taliban rule, women faced problems even in going out of their homes - if they went out, they had to wear the 'burqa' (veil) and be escorted by a male relative. Violations of the dress code could result in public beatings and lashings by the religious police.

The Taliban's religious decrees greatly restricted women's movement, behaviour and dress, and in fact, virtually all aspects of their lives.

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, the decrees are generally more strictly enforced in urban areas, and are especially targeted against educated women who, before the Taliban took power, accounted for 70 percent of all teachers, 50 percent of civil servants, and 40 percent of medical doctors in Afghanistan.

In an October report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said: ''These decrees have had a significant negative impact on women's lives. The rate of illiteracy among girls in Afghanistan is now more than 90 percent.''