” What Did Taliban do with WOMEN? *Warning REAL FOOTAGE “
In this video, you are going to see sixteen facts about what has been done to the women of Afghanistan since 1996: the ban on leaving the house without a male relative nearby in a city that at one point had tens of thousands of widows with nobody to escort them; the dismissal of every female public employee at once in a country where they were 70% of the teachers in Kabul; the banning of girls from school at eight years old; and the execution of a woman in the middle of a packed stadium. Nothing here is invented or exaggerated; all of it has a decree, a report, or a sentence behind it.
Number One: The Taliban demanded, as soon as it took power in 1996, that every woman cover her entire body, including her face, anytime she left the house. Anyone who disobeyed could be stopped in the street and beaten on the spot in front of whoever was walking by. Covering was already used by some families before that, but it had never been a state rule with physical punishment attached for refusal. It was the Taliban that turned the custom into street law, enforced by any agent with a baton.
The morality police beat women for showing a wrist. They beat them for showing an ankle. They beat them for laughing too loudly on a street corner. Accounts from the period describe wooden and metal batons used without warning, often in front of the beaten woman’s own children, who stood watching their mother take the blows without understanding why. There was no process; there was no right of reply. All it took was an agent deciding that the clothing or the behavior had crossed a line for the punishment to happen right there.
One of the strangest rules of the ’90s banned shoes that made noise while walking. The official logic was that not even the sound of a woman’s footsteps should draw a man’s attention on the street. Many began walking in near-total silence on tiptoe, trading heels for soft sandals just to avoid trouble. It is the kind of small detail that shows the scale of the obsession of a regime willing to control even the echo of a footstep on the packed dirt of any ordinary street.
After 2021, women’s voices began disappearing from Afghan radio little by little. Stations that had once had female presenters gradually shifted to all-male lineups—a quiet replacement nobody announced officially. Female singers stopped being played on local stations. In some provinces, officials from the Virtue and Vice Ministry began inspecting radio stations in person, walking into studios to check whether any woman’s voice was still going out on the air without prior permission.
In August of 2024, the Taliban turned the scattered decrees into a single written formal law. Article 13 requires every woman who leaves the house to conceal her voice, her face, and her body. The text specifically forbids her from speaking loudly, singing, laughing, or even reciting prayers aloud in public, including inside a mosque. It is not a recommendation; it is a law formally registered with a legal weight no loose decree from 1996 ever carried inside the Taliban’s own legal system.
The 2024 law also gave the morality police more authority to police any Afghan, not only women, but it is on women that enforcement falls hardest and most often. According to independent reports, women report changing their own behavior inside their homes, avoiding laughing out loud or humming even around family alone, afraid the sound might carry through a thin wall to the street. Twenty-eight years after the first version of the rule, the logic behind it remains exactly the same.
Number Two: The mahram rule says that no woman may leave the house alone; she must be accompanied by a close male relative, such as a husband, father, brother, or son, with no exception provided for. The rule existed in the ’90s and returned right after 2021, applied more and more rigidly in nearly every province of the country. Going to the market, visiting a doctor, picking up a child from school—all of it came to depend on the availability of some man from her own family.
The problem is that Kabul at the end of the ’90s had between 30,000 and 50,000 widows, most of them because of fifteen years of war against the Soviets and then between rival Afghan factions. Many of those women had no living man in the family at all—no adult son, no brother, no living father. For them, the mahram rule was not a passing inconvenience; it was a sentence of almost total isolation inside their own homes, with no prospect of improvement in the near term. Unable to go out alone, a widow could not work, could not buy food, could not take a sick child to a doctor when she needed to.
Accounts from the period describe women asking neighbors, small children, or even strangers on the street to buy basic groceries in exchange for whatever was left in the house. The hunger inside those families did not come from a lack of money; it came from a rule that kept a woman from walking to the corner to buy bread for her children.
The Taliban also ordered that every window facing the street be painted black or covered so that no woman could be seen inside her own home by anyone passing by. The logic was the same as the burqa, only applied to architecture: if the body has to be invisible on the street, the house also has to hide who lives in it. Entire families began living with dark rooms all day long, cutting off sunlight to comply with an order about decency that nobody had asked for.
The rule still holds firm today, with episodes that show the scale of enforcement still in effect in 2026. In Logar Province, a woman received a formal warning for buying groceries alone with no escort anywhere nearby. The shop owner was slapped and taken to the local office of the promotion of virtue, and was only released hours later after signing a paper guaranteeing he would never again sell anything to an unaccompanied woman under threat of harsher punishment.
Number Three: In its very first months in power in 1996, the Taliban fired every woman in public service at once, with no notice and no transition plan. They were about 70% of the teachers in Kabul, 50% of the civil service, and 40% of the country’s doctors up to that moment. Schools and hospitals in the capital collapsed practically overnight because there were not enough people to fill the posts the regime had emptied out.
Entire families depended on a mother’s or a wife’s salary to survive, especially those that had lost the man of the house in the long years of war against the Soviets. When that salary disappeared all at once, families already stretched thin fell straight into extreme poverty with no safety net at all. It was not just individual job loss; it was a clean cut through an entire slice of Kabul’s household economy.
The same script repeated itself in 2021 with one new variation compared to the ’90s. Kabul’s acting mayor announced that municipal posts held by women would be filled by men starting that week. Entire offices were emptied of their female staff within days. One of them, who headed a department at the foreign ministry, told the press she would rather be dead than live through that situation, summing up in one sentence the exact scale of the fall for her.
In December of 2022, the ban reached non-governmental organizations, barring Afghan women from working for humanitarian groups operating in the country. Four months later, in April of 2023, the same rule was extended to Afghan employees of the United Nations inside the territory. The blow was double: it took away those women’s salaries and at the same time cut off the one channel many Afghan families still had for actually receiving food and medical aid at their doors.
In September of 2025, the Taliban went further and banned any Afghan woman from entering a United Nations building in the country, even as an employee, a contractor, or a simple visitor. At the time, the organization estimated that 28.3 million Afghans depended on humanitarian aid just to get through daily life, and it was precisely the female aid workers who could reach other women in communities where a strange man could not even enter the house.
Number Four: The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was created in the ’90s to police public behavior according to the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam. Its agents went around armed with batons, patrolling streets and markets with the power to stop, question, and punish anyone on the spot with no formal proceeding. It was abolished in 2001 along with the fall of the first Taliban government, and revived as soon as the Taliban retook the entire country in 2021 with the same function as before.
Today’s enforcement is broader than that of the ’90s in at least one important respect: there has been written law since August of 2024 giving formal legal cover to every punishment applied. That means an agent no longer has to improvise a justification at the moment of the stop; he cites a specific article of the law. The advantage from the regime’s point of view is clear: less room to say afterward that it was the overzealousness of one isolated official acting on his own.
A report from the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan documented, in a single period examined in detail, 389 arbitrary arrests and 65 cases of mistreatment committed by virtue and vice agents. Most of the cases involved a woman accused of violating hijab rules, a man with a beard trimmed too short or a haircut considered too Western, and people caught simply listening to music at home or inside their own cars alone.
Enforcement reached even inside the schools still operating for boys, checking the uniforms and behavior of the teachers present. In Herat, female teachers who taught without wearing a full chador were turned away at the door of their own school and warned they could lose their jobs if they forgot again the following week. The control stopped being only about the open street and became enforcement in closed settings inside each of their own workplaces.
Number Five: In May of 2022, the Taliban ordered every female television presenter to cover her face on air. The order came from the Ministry of Virtue, described as a final decision with no room for discussion. Channels such as TOLOnews, Ariana, and Shamshad TV were notified by telephone in blunt terms that no alternative was possible. Presenters who until then had read the news with their faces visible had a few days to adapt to a change that went straight onto the screens of millions of viewers.
On the first day of the order, several presenters went on air anyway without covering their faces in a quiet act of disobedience that did not last long. The next day, nearly all of them appeared veiled, with only their eyes visible to the camera. One of them, putting on the mask in a video posted to social media, wrote in the caption that this was a woman being erased by direct order of the Ministry of Virtue and Vice and that she had no choice at all in that moment.
Male presenters at several channels decided to wear masks too, in solidarity with the colleagues forced to cover their faces. The campaign on social media got its own hashtag and circulated outside Afghanistan, drawing international attention to the case. It worked as a gesture, but it changed nothing about the order. The Taliban kept the requirement, and women’s faces simply stopped appearing on Afghan television—an erasure the image carries better than any written decree can explain.
Months earlier, in January of 2022, the Taliban had ordered shopkeepers in Herat to behead the female mannequins in their own display windows. The stated justification was that the human form being represented violated local Islamic law. A video of men sawing off mannequin heads went viral on social media. One shopkeeper said each mannequin had cost around 5,000 Afghanis—some $50—money lost purely because of the order.
Some merchants tried to get around the order by covering only the mannequin’s head with a cloth or a plastic bag. It did not work. The local head of the Ministry of Virtue said covering was not enough; that as long as the head existed, even hidden, no angel would enter that shop to bless the owner and his business. The scene sums up well how the regime saw even a piece of plastic shaped like a woman: a threat that had to be cut off, literally, with a saw.
Number Six: Zarmeena was 35 and had seven children when she was arrested, accused of killing her own husband. According to accounts collected afterward, he had been beating her and her daughters for years. She spent nearly three years in the women’s prison in Kabul in a small cell, caring for newborn twins in there. She thought the punishment would be 100 lashes; she had no idea what the Taliban had decided for her once the babies were weaned and no longer needed their mother nearby.
The night before, the Taliban radio news announced the execution to the whole city and summoned the men, women, and children of Kabul to appear at Ghazi Stadium the next morning. The dead husband’s family tried to reverse the decision at the last minute, going to the authorities to formally grant a pardon on the victim’s behalf, something local Islamic law permits in cases like this. The Taliban refused the request; they said the execution had already been announced publicly, and there was no going back.
On November 16th, 1999, Zarmeena was led onto the stadium field in front of thousands of people gathered to watch. A member of RAWA managed to get in, hiding a small camera under her own burqa, risking her life to document what was going to happen in there. The footage, shaky and only a few seconds long, would be the only visual proof to leave Afghanistan showing this kind of execution for the rest of the world to see afterward.
Outside the country, on another continent, the raw footage reached the United Kingdom and was included in the documentary Beneath the Veil, broadcast in 2001. It was the first time much of the Western public saw in moving images what the regime was doing in a packed public square. Zarmeena was known for years only as the woman in the blue burqa, with no name and no face. An investigation by a British newspaper took more than two years to find out who she had really been before becoming just an image repeated around the world.
Number Seven: After banning male doctors from treating women, the Taliban created a problem it could not solve itself: there were almost no female doctors left to provide that care anywhere in the country. The same women dismissed en masse from public service included much of the nation’s female medical staff. The result was purely mathematical: sick women on one side, and on the other, a health system with nobody qualified of the right gender available to care for them.
Cases of simple infection, treatable with antibiotics in under a week at an ordinary hospital, became a real risk to life. Childbirth complications that a normal hospital resolves in under an hour began killing women at home, far from any available medical care. Families report waiting entire days for an available female doctor while the condition worsened, refusing to take the patient to a man even knowing it could mean the difference between living and dying.
In February of 2023, the Taliban shut down four clinics in Ghazni Province with no advance notice to the communities they served. The stated reason was that female doctors there had been treating male patients, which violated the gender segregation rule. Entire communities were left without a single functioning health post for weeks, because the alternative—hiring male doctors to treat women—ran straight into the other prohibition, the one that had been in place since the ’90s without any change.
Afghanistan already had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world before any recent decree, something around 638 deaths per 100,000 recorded births. Midwives and nurses were precisely the group keeping that number from getting worse every year. Cutting off the training of new professionals, as the regime would do a short time later, means the problem has no solution in sight for the coming years and will only deepen with time.
Number Eight: When it returned to power in 2021, the Taliban stripped the posts of about 250 female judges all at once, because to them it is contrary to the faith for a woman to judge a man. Many of those women worked in courts specializing in domestic violence and crimes against women, hearing cases of abuse, beating, and murder committed by men against their own families—a post that had taken two decades of institutional rebuilding to exist.
The problem went far beyond the unemployment itself. During its advance through the provinces before it even took Kabul, the Taliban emptied the prisons along the way, releasing en masse criminals convicted by courts that many of those same judges had presided over. From one day to the next, women who had punished violent men under the law were left with no post, no escort, and no official protection against the very men they themselves had sent to prison over an entire career.
Men convicted of killing their wives, of rape, of torture walked out of prison knowing exactly who had sentenced them. Accounts collected by international associations of women judges describe calls from unknown numbers, text messages, and voice notes, all promising direct personal revenge. One of the most frequently cited threats said almost word for word that when the man got out of prison, he would do to the judge what he had done to his own wife years before.
One judge said she learned of the mass release at midnight by telephone. She fled by car that same hour, wearing a burqa so she would not be recognized at Taliban checkpoints on the way to the border. Shortly after, neighbors sent word that armed men had shown up at her former house asking for information about where the family had gone. The escape route she chose that night decided whether the family would survive the following months.
A few dozen women judges managed to leave the country in the first weeks with help from international organizations. Most are still in hiding inside Afghanistan today, changing phones and cities whenever they sense they have been identified. One of them summed up the situation in a short sentence:
“I sent a Talib to prison under the law, and today he commands people from that same movement in power.”
She says she barely raises her voice above a whisper inside her own home, afraid of the wrong neighbor.
Number Nine: Safia Amajan headed the Department of Women’s Affairs in Kandahar and spent her days opening vocational schools for women, teaching sewing and baking to anyone who wanted some financial independence of her own. She had already asked the Afghan government for personal security, citing threats received because of the very work she had been doing in the province for years, and the request was denied for lack of available resources.
On September 25th, 2006, as she left home for work in the morning, Amajan was shot four times by two men on a motorcycle and died instantly in front of her own front gate. Responsibility was never proven in court, but suspicion fell on the Taliban, which had a declared motive to see her work as a direct threat. It was one of the first killings of a high-profile Afghan woman after the fall of the regime in 2001, the first in a series that would repeat over the following decade.
Sitara Achakzai followed a path much like Amajan’s. A member of the Kandahar Provincial Council and an activist for women’s rights in the region, she was shot dead on April 12th, 2009, as she stepped out of her own car in front of her house, with no time to react. The Taliban publicly claimed responsibility at the time, alleging that she was spying for the Americans. There was no evidence at all for that specific accusation, only her political work in defense of local women.
Malalai Kakar was the highest-ranking policewoman in all of Afghanistan, heading the crimes against women department in Kandahar for years. She was shot dead in September of 2008, along with her son, who was driving the car at the exact moment of the attack.
In the years that followed, journalists, teachers, public employees, and activists continued to be targeted by the same kind of killing, always with the same repeated pattern: a woman who occupied too much public space for the taste of the regime in power.
Zarifa Ghafari became mayor of Maidan Shahr in 2018 at only 26 years old, in a conservative city where women almost never held public office. She survived several assassination attempts over the course of her term, and in 2020, her own father, a senior military officer, was shot dead in front of the family home. When Kabul fell in August of 2021, she fled to Germany, leaving behind the post in the city where she had built her entire career.
Number Ten: In the days before Kabul fell, many women spent the night burning the evidence of their own professional lives. University diplomas, course certificates, photographs, and work uniforms—all of it went into the fire or the trash before the Taliban could search the house. Beauty salon owners painted over their own signs in the dead of night. Anyone with a resume saved on a computer deleted the file and wiped the whole drive, afraid that one name there could become a sentence. Twenty years of career, of teaching, of civil service exams had to be erased in a few hours of a single night.
It was not paranoia. Accounts from women who had worked for the previous government, for international non-governmental organizations, or for the security forces described Taliban visits going door-to-door looking for specific names with printed lists in hand. Many began sleeping at relatives’ houses, changing addresses every few days just to disappear off the map before somebody found them.
Kabul fell on August 15th, 2021, a Sunday, less than four months after the United States confirmed the full withdrawal of its troops from the country. President Ashraf Ghani fled by helicopter, carrying bags of cash according to accounts from the time that circulated afterward. Within a few hours, the entire government had collapsed without a single shot fired inside the capital.
Kabul’s airport became, almost overnight, the only possible way out for thousands of desperate people. Between August 14th and August 30th, the evacuation operation led by the United States managed to get about 123,000 people out of the country in total. The scenes outside the airport became some of the most replayed images of the decade: crowds pushing against the gate, people clinging to the sides of military aircraft trying to escape along with the plane. At least seven people died crushed in the crush of the crowd before any plane even managed to lift off Afghan ground.
On August 26th, a suicide bomber tied to the Islamic State Khorasan group blew himself up at Abbey Gate, one of the access points to the airport. Dozens of Afghan civilians died along with American service members who were securing the area at that moment. The attack forced the withdrawal to speed up in the days that followed, rushing everything.
A number nobody has ever been able to calculate properly was left behind: women who needed to get out more than anyone else and had no papers, no contacts, and no time.
Almost four years later, on July 8th, 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against two Taliban leaders, including Akhundzada himself. The charge, for the first time in the court’s history, was gender persecution as a crime against humanity. It changes nothing in the practical life of anyone still living inside the country, but it puts down on paper, with recognized international legal weight, what every fact on this list already showed on its own, without needing any court at all.
Number Eleven: In April of 2026, the Taliban published its own code on marriage and the separation of spouses. The text conditions any marriage on the permission of the woman’s guardian and creates obstacles that are practically impossible to overcome for anyone trying to divorce or separate from a husband. Human rights organizations pointed out that the code, in practice, implicitly sanctions child marriage itself, setting no minimum age at all for a bride.
Before that, in 2009, then-President Hamid Karzai had signed a law formally criminalizing child marriage and domestic violence in the home. In practice, that law was almost never enforced outside the major urban centers, especially in rural areas where tribal tradition spoke far louder than any code written in Kabul. The Taliban of 2026 did not even formally repeal that law; it simply hollowed out what little it was still worth in the country’s daily practice.
In poor regions of Afghanistan, girls have been promised in marriage in exchange for a bride price paid directly to her family, a custom that runs back generations in the countryside. The promise generally meant that the girl would go to live with her future husband’s family before she even reached puberty, growing up inside a house that had never been hers, surrounded by strangers who decided every aspect of her life from then on without consulting her about any of it.
After 2021, that practice began growing again, driven by the extreme poverty that spread across the whole country under the new regime at an accelerating pace. Families with no income, no work, no real access to humanitarian aid began to see the early marriage of a daughter as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed in the house. Organizations working in the region report a consistent rise in cases since the fall of Kabul.
The result is a girl who does not choose her husband, does not choose when to marry, and if the marriage turns out badly, has practically no way out of it without the formal authorization of a man—often the same man who decided the marriage in the first place without consulting her about anything. It is a closed system, deliberately designed by the Taliban to leave a woman with no exit at any stage of her married life, from beginning to end, with no exception written into any law in the country.
Number Twelve: After 2021, women were barred from parks and from gyms one at a time, in separate decrees spread out over months. The justification changed from province to province: sometimes a lack of available segregated space, sometimes behavior considered improper by local inspectors. The practical result was always the same: one fewer public place where a woman could simply be, with no work and no obligation, just existing in the open air for a moment.
Beauty salons had been shut down twice in the country’s recent history: first in the ’90s, and again in 2023 on the claim that the business encouraged vanity and went against the Islamic faith. The second ban landed on customers in a particular way. Over two decades of rebuilding, the beauty salon had become one of the few spaces where women gathered with no man nearby, traded news, laughed out loud, and existed without any direct surveillance over them.
The Taliban also closed shelters and support centers for victims of domestic violence that had been operating for years in the country, some of them created with international support after 2001. A woman being beaten by her husband or a relative literally lost the only formal place she could run to for help. The protection network built over twenty years of work vanished entirely within months, with nothing put in its place.
What was left in the end was the home itself—the very place a woman often needed to flee from to protect herself. With no parks, no gyms, no salons, no shelters, Afghan women’s public life shrank until it nearly disappeared from the map of the country’s major cities. People walking the streets of Kabul today describe something strange: the almost complete absence of women walking alone.
Number Thirteen: In 1998, the organization Physicians for Human Rights interviewed women in Kabul to measure the psychological impact of the first years of Taliban rule on them. The result shocked even the researchers themselves: 97% of those interviewed showed signs of major depression; 71% met the full clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress, a figure rarely seen in surveys of a civilian population outside an active war zone.
The United Nations estimated in that same period that around 8,000 women in Kabul alone were living with some form of severe psychological trauma. There was no mental health infrastructure available to treat a number that high. The few female psychologists still practicing did so in hiding inside homes, at the same risk as any other clandestine activity by women in that era. The suffering had numbers, it had a published study, and even so, almost nobody could get treatment.
Recent accounts collected by human rights organizations after 2021 describe a very similar pattern repeating in the country. Women speak of isolation, loss of purpose, and the sense of being trapped in a life they no longer recognize as their own. Some say they avoid leaving the house even when they would have formal permission to do so, because the street stopped feeling like a safe place after entire years of constant restriction on every one of their movements.
The detail that appears most often in these accounts is not the punishment itself; it is the constant anticipation of it. A woman who has never been beaten, but lives in fear of being beaten every single day, carries a psychological weight similar to someone who has actually suffered it. That is the kind of damage that does not show up in physical violence statistics, only in mental health research—and it is exactly the kind of damage that has no solution in sight as long as the structure of control remains standing in the country.
Number Fourteen: In 1996, the Taliban banned girls over eight years old from school. From one day to the next, a girl sitting in a classroom on Friday simply had no class on Monday. There was no adjustment period, no exception for anyone close to finishing the school year. Books were left behind in locked rooms, and an entire generation of girls stopped studying in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of an equation, in the middle of whatever they were learning at that moment.
The Taliban returned to power in August of 2021, promising education for girls within Islamic law. On September 17th, the education ministry reopened secondary school for boys only, without a line about the millions of female students and teachers left out of that decision. Families waited for a new announcement for entire months; it never came clearly, only loose promises kept piling up that the reopening was near, with no date ever actually set.
On March 23rd, 2022, the government announced that schools would reopen. Thousands of girls went in uniform, some with new supplies bought for the occasion, and found the gates locked. During the night, Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada had canceled everything on his own, overriding Taliban leaders who argued for keeping the decision. Girls went home crying, and girls’ secondary education remains closed to this day, with no prospect of change.
On December 20th, 2022, the ban reached the universities. Students in the middle of a degree were informed they could no longer attend class, on the claim that they were not following gender segregation rules. The order came with a detail meant to pressure anyone who might not care: if the female students did not comply with the requirements, male students would also be barred from attending, turning every male classmate into an informal enforcer of the restriction imposed on them.
One last opening remained: nursing and midwifery courses at private institutes around the country. In February of 2024, after months of internal negotiation, health ministry officials managed to keep that door open, arguing that the country needed female health professionals to treat female patients. Thousands switched programs just to keep studying something, even if it was not exactly what they had chosen before everything changed.
In December of 2024, that door closed for good as well. The Supreme Leader ordered the health ministry to suspend all female enrollment at nursing and midwifery institutes in the country. Students found out through phone calls from friends offering condolences, thinking for a moment that someone had actually died. Five institutes confirmed the closure that same week. It was the last route to formal education still left for an Afghan woman after the age of eight.
Number Fifteen: After banning girls from school in 1996, the Taliban ran into a response it had not expected: classes went on in secret inside homes, even at the risk of flogging or prison for anyone caught teaching. Much of that underground network was organized by RAWA, an association founded in 1977 by Meena Keshwar Kamal, an activist only twenty years old at the time, murdered in 1987 before the Taliban even existed as a formal armed group.
The organization kept operating even after its own founder’s death, and it was during the Taliban regime of the ’90s that it took on the most important role in its history. RAWA began setting up clandestine schools in basements and in rooms with the curtains drawn, disguised as sewing groups or cooking classes for anyone glancing in from outside. Hidden books, quick lessons, everyone ready to break it all down in seconds if someone suddenly knocked at the door.
In 1999, it is estimated that 30,000 children, most of them girls, were studying through those clandestine schools in the Kabul area alone. A teacher caught teaching could be flogged or arrested on the spot, but many kept teaching anyway, fully aware of the real risk they ran every day. The reason they themselves gave was simple: if they stopped, an entire generation would grow up unable to read anything, and that weighed more on them than the fear of punishment.
The same kind of school came back after 2021 in a very similar format, adapted for this new generation of girls barred from the country’s regular classrooms. Families organize small groups inside homes, rotating the location frequently so as not to draw the attention of the wrong neighbor. It is basically the same arrangement as the ’90s, repeated now out of pure necessity because the ban came back almost identical to what it had been decades earlier, with almost no real change.
Nearly thirty years on between the first ban and the second, the country still sees the same kind of response forming away from watching eyes: a hidden classroom, a book passed from hand to hand, a teacher willing to risk her own freedom for a student who only wanted to learn to read properly. It is hard to call that a real victory, but it is the most concrete proof that no law—neither the one from 1996 nor the one from 2024—has managed to erase that will completely.
Number Sixteen: Two days after entering Kabul, the Taliban called journalists from around the world to a press conference. It was August 17th, 2021. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid took the stage and said the group had changed, that this time would be different from the ’90s. He spoke slowly, in a calm, almost gentle tone. Cameras from American, European, and Arab channels recorded every word, broadcasting live to a world that wanted to believe it was true.
Mujahid promised that women would be able to work and study, as long as it was within the framework of Islamic law. He also said there would be no revenge against anyone who had worked for the previous government, nor against interpreters, journalists, or female public employees. The international press ran the statement almost without question; some analysts even wrote that perhaps the new Taliban really was different from that of 1996.
It would take less than a week to show the scale of the mistake behind that speech. Women who went to work as usual in the following days found the doors closed at ministries and government offices in Kabul. Guards told them to go home, with no date to return. Teachers, bank employees, lab technicians, all heard the same phrase:
“Wait for new instructions.”
The instructions never came.
Kabul’s acting mayor went on to announce that municipal posts held by women would pass to men one by one, with no room for negotiation. On September 7th, 2021, the Taliban announced the new government. Not one woman received a post—not even a symbolic second-tier position.
The Ministry of Women’s Affairs, created in 2001, was abolished that same month. On the building where it had operated, a new sign was hung: Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the same body that had enforced the rules of the ’90s. The change of sign on its own already told the whole story of what was coming for the country’s women.
