Roya* speaks softly, in impeccable English that she learned, as she says, by listening to American pop music, something she will never confess in front of her mother. The video call on Instagram is cut off for a moment. The sisters need a VPN, a virtual private network, to access social networks, since local operators restrict traffic from applications such as Instagram and Facebook. The image returns. From a tidy room in Kabul province, the 23-year-old remembers what she calls “the worst day of my life.”
It has been five years since the Taliban regained control of the country, just days after US troops withdrew after two decades of military presence. Then-President Ashraf Ghani fled to the United Arab Emirates, and the Taliban entered government buildings without anyone standing up to them. According to BBC estimates, in just ten days they controlled almost the entire country.
Roya was not yet born when the Taliban first ruled, but his parents did live it, and this time they did not hesitate. They put what little they could into a couple of bags and headed towards the airport. They never arrived. The Taliban already controlled the only access road and only allowed foreigners to pass. Roya later remembers seeing videos on Instagram of the runway overflowing with people, civilians clinging to the fuselage of the planes. “You could see some of them fall during takeoff, because it was so full,” he remembers. His mother hoped to escape to Pakistan, where some of her cousins had already fled in 1996, the first time the Taliban took Kabul.
For Roya, the worst thing is boredom. Wash clothes and sweep the broom to fill the day. “When you want to get out of a pit of depression, you do the things that give you joy, but my country no longer lets me do any of that.” Before the Taliban I played soccer on a women's team. Today, parks and gyms are off-limits to any Afghan woman. On the door of her room there still hangs a red piece of equipment with her name on the back, a tribute to the women's team, today in exile, which it has not been able to throw away. Suddenly his voice breaks and he begins to cry. Between sobs, he explains that he tries to be strong for his family, “although sometimes,” he says, “the emptiness overcomes me when I think about everything I have lost.”
Her little sister, Gulalai*, then takes the floor, without letting go of Roya's hand. Unlike her eldest, who was able to finish high school shortly before the arrival of the Taliban, Gulalai has not set foot in a classroom since she was 14 years old. “They stole my education and adolescence,” he sighs. Forced to spend her days locked in her room, she began listening to Radio Begum, a station run by Afghan women from Kabul. It issues a school curriculum for girls between 12 and 18 years old, in Pashto and Dari, and has managed to remain almost outside Taliban control, except for occasional setbacks.
Gulalai enthusiastically followed the geography and history classes, and today she listens to one of the psychology programs, designed to help young Afghan women take care of their mental health. While listening to the program, she always takes the opportunity to put on her makeup. Over the years she has gathered a small collection of cosmetics and confesses that she always wears “pink lipstick or gloss” under the veil that covers her face, although since June the Taliban banned wearing makeup and perfume in public, another twist in the tightening of the rules.
On the few occasions they go out, the sisters say they barely come across other women. The Taliban patrol armed with American M4 rifles, the same ones that Washington once delivered to equip the Afghan Army and police. When they meet up with friends, it is usually in places with spaces segregated by sex, divided from top to bottom by screens. “It's humiliating, a total injustice,” says Roya, still with red eyes.
Since that suffocating turn in 2021, the mental health of many Afghan women has deteriorated. A UN Women report reveals that seven in ten have “poor” or “very poor” mental health, and suicide rates are also on the rise. Added to this is a fierce economic crisis, aggravated since the Taliban banned women from working in public administration, in beauty salons, as journalists and in NGOs. For Afghan women, sewing is one of the few trades allowed under the fundamentalist regime.
More than 2.4 million young Afghan women have been deprived of a secondary education, and UN Women has recorded more than 100 decrees passed against women and girls. These fundamentalist measures have institutionalized discrimination and have deepened what the organization considers “the worst women's rights crisis in the world.” As Kabul wakes up today, decked out in flags and murals praising Islamic laws, ready to celebrate five years since the Taliban's return to power, most women remain at home.
