Before Afghanistan fell, Wajiha Amiri, now 29, was working for a radio station in Kunduz, in the north of the country, on a show that promoted women’s right to education and employment. While such topics might sound ordinary here in the UK, in Afghanistan, a country with a complex history when it comes to women’s education, Wajiha’s work was risky. But she wasn’t scared.
“I could see the impact of my work,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “When Afghanistan fell [to the Taliban in 2021] I was heartbroken. But I didn’t give up.”
Wajiha and a group of her friends joined female protestors in the capital city of Kabul. “Living life under the Taliban is like death anyway, and what is the worst they will do to us if we protest? They will kill us. But at least we won’t have given up.”
Her dedication to her cause might sound impressive, dangerous – reckless, even, but for her and her friends, it was not a choice. The Taliban is “the same brutal group” they always were, she says. “The Taliban would rather see women begging on the streets than in offices and moving the country forward. Women are committing suicide across the country because there is no hope.”
She remembers the Taliban roaming the neighbourhood and threatening to shoot women in the street, all but imprisoning them in their homes. “It was a dark period.”
When the hard-line fundamentalist group first took over Afghanistan in 1996, it became a global byword for human rights abuses - above all, the repression of women. After a U.S.-led coalition toppled the group in 2001, Afghan women began reclaiming their freedom.
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But, last summer, the U.S. signed a peace agreement with the group and withdrew its remaining troops from the country. The Taliban swiftly swept across Afghanistan and regained control, taking Kabul and ousting the government on 15 August. But this time, in a press conference they gave to the world on 17 August, they promised things would be different for women. Despite their history, Taliban spokesmen insisted that they would respect women’s rights – but with the caveat that they would do so “within the bounds of Islamic law”. Western journalists rushed to amplify Taliban voices as reformed, while global leaders urged patience to allow them time to prove they had.
Those who had lived under Taliban rule before knew not to trust them. Airports were swarmed as thousands fled the country, with some people even clinging to planes as they attempted to take off, desperate to escape. Reports of Taliban members patrolling (and shutting) the borders and closing key roads to keep people stuck in Afghanistan flooded the front pages. True to form, the Taliban also threatened the lives and families of activists, journalists and anyone who had worked with Western organisations. They massacred ethnic Hazaras, suppressed the media and executed dissidents.
And the Taliban also issued a decree on women’s rights – which failed to mention education or employment.
When they first announced their Cabinet in September, no women were included. The group immediately dismantled the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. The dark period had, it seemed, officially returned.
A return to darkness
Laila*, 30, grew up in Chahar Bagh-e Safa, a city in the eastern province of Nangarhār. She remembers the instability and repression of the first Taliban reign, although she was just a child. “When they [the Taliban] announced that girls will go to school, I was expecting that now we will be relaxed, maybe now they will let girls go to school and we will have our rights.”
But the group barred girls from secondary school – until March this year, when the Taliban allowed them in for just one day, before sending them home due to a “technical issue” with their uniform. They have remained shut ever since. And of course, if the secondary school ban continues, soon there will be no women eligible for university at all.
Taliban harassment, as well as harsh restrictions on dress and behaviour, have caused most women to stop attending university. Guards reportedly stand outside the university buildings shouting at students to fix their clothes. One university student told Amnesty International that she was threatened for being without a guardian. The Taliban, she says, “started giving me electric shocks ... they were calling me a prostitute [and] a bitch ... The one holding the gun said, ‘I will kill you, and no one will be able to find your body.’”
“I had an interest in books,” says Laila, “but afterwards my brothers burned them and didn’t let me continue my studies. Now that we are not allowed to work, I sit at home all day. Not only did I enjoy my job in the field, but it was also a source of income to my family.”
There are days when Laila and her nine children go without anything to eat. “Life has become a lot harder for Afghan people,” she says, “especially my Afghan sisters. People are dying of hunger and illness, all our educated people have left the country, people are selling their children for money.”
In just one year since their takeover, the Taliban has decimated nearly two decades of progress for women’s rights. Men and women may no longer sit together in offices. Most women can no longer work, or even travel without a ‘mahram’ – a male chaperone. In May, the Taliban reintroduced the infamous ‘burqa mandate’, requiring women to cover themselves head to toe. Anyone peacefully protesting these laws has been threatened, arrested, tortured or forcibly disappeared, according to Amnesty International.
“The Taliban had never changed. It was all to deceive people,” says Wajiha.
Zubaida Akbar, an Afghan women’s rights expert and program officer for a human rights organisation, explains that this came as no surprise. “This is something we warned about constantly throughout the peace negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “Many knew that if the Taliban took over, the first thing that would be compromised would be the rights and freedoms of Afghan women.”
Zubaida points out that the Taliban didn’t disappear in the 20-year interim between reigns – “they were still fighting and there was a war on women. They were attacking female journalists, politicians, activists … The biggest sacrifice was made by the women of Afghanistan.”
During the peace process, Zubaida says, the U.S. special envoy was effectively telling the women of Afghanistan that there would be a “Taliban 2.0”, one that had reformed and wouldn’t be as draconian as the Taliban that ruled in the 1990s.
“We never believed that. We never trusted the Taliban,” she says. “We never trusted that they would keep their promises. And we warned the U.S., and the international community about it, but unfortunately, they didn't listen to the women of Afghanistan and to the people of Afghanistan, and they signed an unconditional deal with them anyway.
“The Western media really tried hard after the collapse of the government to whitewash them and continue to feed into this narrative that they’ve changed, a narrative built to make the peace deal work.”
Zubaida says that while Western journalists “competed” to go to Afghanistan and show “this new face of the Taliban”, Afghan journalists were being detained and tortured for covering women’s protests.
In the 12 months since the fall of Kabul, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has been pushed off front pages by the war in Ukraine, which has consumed Europe and America’s attention and caused global food and energy prices to skyrocket. The journalists who broadcast their dealings with the Taliban have gone quiet.
“No matter how much you try to whitewash the Taliban, it's impossible,” says Zubaida. “They are a terrorist group. They have been trained to oppose every single human rights value.”
Women for Women International is one of the last remaining NGOs in Afghanistan solely dedicated to women’s rights. The NGO has worked in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, helping more than 127,000 women in twelve centres over three provinces. A yearlong ‘Stronger Women, Stronger Nations’ training program teaches basic literacy, maths and small business skills as well as providing support and a monthly stipend.
Sara Bowcutt, the managing director of WFWI, remembers the day that Kabul fell. “I stood in my kitchen, getting voice notes from colleagues in Kabul. I’ve worked in a lot of conflict-afflicted countries, and that day, the fear in their voices is something I’d never experienced. It wasn’t just about physical safety; it was about what was going to come next. Whether they would be able to leave the house, work, or even tell people they had an education.”
Sara remembers a colleague saying to her: “This is not Afghan women’s first rodeo. They know what is coming.”
At first, the NGO paused its program to focus on immediate needs, providing kitchen garden and poultry kits to women who could no longer work, and were at risk of starvation. The stipend increased and the program took on more of an emotional support role: a safe space for women to gather.
Parvati*, 22, goes to the WFWI classes because “it is a place where I can meet my other Afghan sisters, who share the same experiences as me and understand what me and my family are going through”. She had once wanted to be a teacher, she says, but her husband lost his job following the takeover. They have used all their savings to buy food and have “nothing in the house”.
This year, WFWI conducted interviews with its current and former participants, as well as women’s rights activists in Afghanistan. The report found that 100% of women had experienced financial decline and food shortages since the takeover, with two thirds saying they often did not have enough to eat. More than half said they could no longer bring in any income. A fifth of women had had to pull their children out of school, to help earn money to feed the family. One woman in Kabul said: “We’re surviving. We’re not living. We’re surviving but we deserve to live.”
In January 2022, when WFWI restarted its training program in Nangahar province, 99% of women returned. They even expanded the program in July, and now have nearly 2,000 women enrolled in their program – despite the new danger. “That didn’t surprise me,” said Sara. “One of the things I have learned from working at this organisation is that women’s power and resilience is undeniable, and, given the opportunity to take some of that back, I’m not surprised that they did.”
One year after the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s humanitarian and women’s rights crisis is worsening every day. “But Afghan women haven't given up on wanting the ability to shape their own lives. They haven't given up on wanting to study, to go to work, or to support their families.”
All the women who spoke to Cosmopolitan UK for this article stressed that the international community should try to reason with – but crucially, not recognise – the de facto government, until they change their stance on women’s rights. Most importantly, they beg the world not to forget about Afghanistan.
Wajiha points out that the Taliban get much of their legitimacy from the American-Taliban peace deal, known as the Doha Agreement, and are still seeking resources from the international community – which could be used as leverage.
“We don’t need statements of condemnation from the international community. We don’t need them to tell us who the Taliban are. We know who the Taliban are. We the women of Afghanistan have lost all our rights. The Taliban need to lose something today.”
*Name has been changed
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