Afghanistan: 5 Years in the Dark

How the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a country where half the population has been ordered to disappear.

Fatima keeps her medical textbooks in a cupboard she no longer opens. Her university ID card, with its photograph of a 19-year-old who intended to become a doctor, sits among them like a relic from another country. In a sense, it is. The Afghanistan that printed the card – a state with a constitution, a free press and women in its universities, courtrooms, and newsrooms – no longer exists.

“Sometimes I look at a bird and feel jealous, because it has more freedom than I do,” she told me from Kabul, where, at 24, she describes herself as a prisoner in her own home. “I often think that if the Taliban had not come, I would still be at university, working toward my biggest dream of becoming a doctor. Now, instead of dreaming about my future, I spend my days wondering how I will survive and asking myself, ‘Why me?’”

August 15 marks five years since the fall of Kabul, and Fatima’s question has an answer, though not one that offers her any comfort. It is not just her. Roughly 20 million Afghan women and girls have been erased from public life – not by accident or by the chaos of war but by design. Decree by decree, ministry circular by ministry circular, the removal of half of Afghanistan’s population from its schools, offices, parks, and airwaves transitioned seamlessly from an emergency into an administrative routine.

A System Built Decree by Decree

What began in the autumn of 2021 as a scattering of individual prohibitions has hardened into a legal and bureaucratic machine. According to U.N. monitoring, the Taliban have issued hundreds of decrees and directives since seizing power, a large share of them aimed specifically at women and girls. Each one has shrunk the space in which a woman may learn, work, travel, speak, or simply exist, and together they form what U.N. experts and a growing number of governments now call a “gender apartheid.”

The dismantling of education came first and cut deepest. In March 2022, girls were barred from school beyond the sixth grade. In December 2022, women were expelled from every public and private university in the country. In December 2024, the Taliban closed even medical and midwifery institutes, the last narrow professional medical path left open to women like Fatima. Afghanistan is today the only country on earth where girls are forbidden to study because of their gender; UNESCO puts the number locked out of secondary school at more than 2.2 million.

Work followed the same trajectory. Women were dismissed from the civil service and told to stay home on reduced salaries; in January of this year, according to the U.N. human rights office, even those payments stopped and their employment was formally terminated. Women were banned from working for national and international NGOs in December 2022 and for the United Nations itself in April 2023. In July 2023, the Taliban ordered the closure of thousands of beauty salons, one of the last sectors in which women could still earn an income, destroying an estimated 60,000 jobs. Since September 2025, Taliban forces have gone further still, physically blocking women, including U.N. staff, from entering U.N. compounds.

These restrictions now define a woman’s daily life. She may not travel any long distance without a mahram, a male guardian. She is banned from parks, gyms, sports facilities, and public bathhouses. Unmarried women have been denied work and health care simply for having no husband. The “vice and virtue” law of August 2024 ordered women to cover their faces and declared that a woman’s voice should not be heard in public; in several provinces, women’s voices have since been banned from radio and television altogether, and female journalists can no longer work at all, according to Human Rights Watch. Women have been arrested on the street for “improper hijab,” most recently in a wave of detentions in Herat this January, part of a broader crackdown on women’s clothing and public presence.

The law itself has been remade around their absence. The courts, constitution, and statutes that once protected Afghan women, including a minimum marriage age and the criminalization of forced marriage, have been swept away. A decree published in May of this year sets out procedures for annulling a child marriage once the girl reaches puberty while establishing no minimum age of marriage at all. U.N. Women and Amnesty International warn that it effectively normalizes the marrying-off of children.

The war on women is the most visible face of Taliban rule, but five years in, almost every group outside the movement’s own narrow circle has something to fear.

Consider the Hazaras, the country’s Shiite minority, comprising perhaps a fifth of the population. The Hazaras sit at the intersection of every persecution in Afghanistan: ethnic, religious, and, for Hazara women, gender. A growing number of experts describe their treatment as meeting the threshold of crimes........

© The Diplomat