‘We have no choice and no voice’

They can’t study, work or even leave the house without a man. Since the Taliban retook Afghanistan 18 months ago, women have been virtually erased from public life, as Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford discovers

afiya was meant to graduate the day the Taliban took power. Her family were due at Afghanistan’s top business university for a ceremony at the restored Darul Aman Palace near the capital, Kabul. At 22 years old, she was a symbol of Afghanistan’s ‘progression’ – highly educated and about to start her own business.

‘We were so excited,’ Safiya, now 24, tells me. ‘My two best friends and I planned to wear matching pink suits under our gowns for the graduation.’

She was one of 30 females on her business administration course, outnumbered by men but evidence the country was opening up to women, albeit slowly. A degree from Kardan University, which two years earlier had got the country’s top rating, was a guarantee of success.

But instead of collecting her honours in a mortarboard and gown on 15 August 2021, Safiya was peeking through her bedroom window watching people running towards the airport to escape the Taliban. An hour and a half after her graduation ceremony was due to start, she saw the Taliban marching down her street waving their white flags with the Islamic Shahada declaration of Muslim faith inscribed on it.

The Taliban flag was soon everywhere – not the traditional symbol of surrender but the inverse of the Islamic State flag (black with the same inscription in white). It was a visual declaration of dramatic change for the country after two decades of international occupation. For Safiya – and all Afghan women – life had irrevocably altered. It meant the end of studying, of working, of careers, of having choices, of having a voice.

‘There were ten Taliban Rangers [pickup trucks] and Taliban in each vehicle waving flags with rockets on their shoulders,’ she says. ‘I was terrified and shut the window. My brother came home and told us that our neighbour, an Afghan army general, had told him the Taliban had taken Afghanistan and he was leaving to go to the airport.’

By the afternoon of what was meant to be a celebration, the Taliban was knocking on the family’s front door, looking for the army general. The Taliban had seized power and now they wanted revenge. When they couldn’t find the general, they demanded food from Safiya’s family. Rockets on shoulders can be very persuasive.

But worse was to come for the houseful of mainly young women. Safiya’s father had died years earlier and the family was headed by their mother who was a girls’ school headmistress. The Taliban had noticed young women in the house and hours later they returned wanting more than just food. ‘They said they were ten unmarried men,’ Safiya recalls, ‘and my

Sbrother had a duty to give his sisters to them for marriage. ‘My brother lied to make them go away. Then my mother called my uncle and asked him to help us.’ As the senior male in the household, Safiya’s uncle was taken more seriously by the young Taliban fighters and was able to ward off the persistent demands.

‘I can’t bear to think about that,’ Safiya says. ‘I know by the way they took our country, our dreams and our goals, they can force me to marry them too. But I would rather die than marry a Taliban fighter.’

Safiya and all other Afghan women are being erased from public life. They’re barred from education above year six. They’re banned from working, apart from some medics. They’re mostly prevented from working for international aid agencies (NGOS), where much of the workforce is female, and prevented from travelling without a male chaperone. They’re told to wear a hijab in public. Every aspect of life you can think of is severely restricted for the female Afghan.

I first met Safiya when she approached a member of my team as we were filming a Taliban checkpoint near her home, a week or so after the Taliban entered Kabul. She was half bent with terror, crouching low trying not to be spotted talking to us by the Taliban gunmen nearby as she gestured to my colleague Chris for help. ‘I saw you filming and I was so scared, but I thought I had to try to tell you about what is happening to my family, to Afghanistan,’ she says.

Today Safiya, who I’ve stayed in contact with since we met, is virtually paralysed after the taxi she was in was stopped at a Taliban checkpoint and deliberately rammed by a Taliban truck. The impact was catastrophic. An X-ray shows she has a bulge in her L4 and L5 discs pressing against her spinal cord causing sharp and constant pain. She needs immediate physiotherapy and probably surgery.

Yet her family are forced to move home regularly, abandoned by the international community who told them they were being empowered, then after the takeover left them to be hunted by the Taliban who regard them as enemy collaborators.

‘The Taliban have taken everything

‘THEY TOOK OUR COUNTRY, OUR DREAMS AND OUR GOALS. THEY CAN FORCE US TO MARRY THEM TOO’