This week marks five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell and the Afghan government collapsed with astonishing speed. Within days, many of the fears about what Taliban rule would mean for women and girls began becoming reality.

Five years later, Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are formally prohibited from secondary and higher education. According to UNESCO and UNICEF, around 2.2 million adolescent girls are currently barred from secondary school. Since the Taliban banned women from universities in December 2022, more than 100,000 young women have also been denied access to higher education.

Those numbers are enormous, but perhaps the easiest way to understand what five years means is to think about the age of the girls involved. A twelve-year-old who lost access to her education when the Taliban took Kabul in 2021 is now seventeen. She has spent almost her entire adolescence unable to do something as ordinary as attend secondary school.

Education is only part of what has happened. Since returning to power, the Taliban have issued more than 100 decrees and directives affecting women and girls, restricting their education, employment, movement, clothing and participation in public life.

A major UN Women assessment published ahead of the fifth anniversary, drawing on thousands of interviews conducted across Afghanistan, found that half of the women interviewed now leave their homes only once or twice a month. Only 7 per cent were employed, while almost three quarters said they did not feel safe leaving home without a male family member.

These figures are horrendous, but figures can make something profoundly human feel strangely remote. Behind them are women who had jobs and careers; students who had plans; girls who expected to go to school; athletes who wanted to compete; journalists who wanted to report; and mothers wondering what kind of future will be available to their daughters.

The situation has not stopped deteriorating either. Human Rights Watch reported this week that Taliban authorities had forcibly disappeared six male staff members of the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation after taking them into custody on 18 July. As of 13 August, their whereabouts and the reasons for their detention had not been disclosed.

One of the organisations continuing to document what is happening to Afghan women is Rukhshana Media, founded by Afghan journalist Zahra Joya in 2020.

Zahra’s experience of Taliban rule began long before 2021. During the Taliban’s first period in power, she dressed as a boy, called herself Mohammed and walked for hours so that she could attend school. She later studied law and became a journalist. When the Taliban returned to Kabul in 2021, she was forced to leave Afghanistan but continued running Rukhshana Media from exile.

Rukhshana reports extensively on the experiences of Afghan women and girls, covering education, employment, healthcare, forced marriage, violence and the everyday consequences of Taliban rule. Female journalists working with the organisation continue to report from inside Afghanistan, with some unable to publish under their own names because of the risks involved.

That work has become increasingly important as international attention has moved elsewhere. In August 2021, Afghanistan dominated the world’s news. Politicians repeatedly spoke about protecting women and girls and governments promised that they would not be forgotten. Five years later, wars, elections and political crises elsewhere have understandably taken over the headlines, but Afghan women are still living with the consequences of what happened in 2021.

There is also a problem with how we talk about Afghan women. Too often they are presented entirely as victims of the Taliban rather than women with professions, opinions, ambitions and lives of their own. Many continue to work where they can, study through alternative means, campaign, teach, organise and report. Afghan women journalists have continued documenting their country while knowing that doing so can place them at considerable personal risk.

Independent journalism is particularly important in those circumstances. If Afghan journalists cannot report, much of our ability to understand what is happening inside the country disappears with them. It also leaves the story of Afghanistan increasingly dependent on government statements, international diplomacy and occasional bursts of foreign media attention.

In the image above, we can see Afghan women protesting Taliban rule in 1998. Nearly three decades later, women and girls are again fighting systematic exclusion from education and public life. Photo: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) / Wikimedia Commons. Free-use image.

Five years is long enough for restrictions that once caused international outrage to begin being treated as an established political reality. They should not be. Girls being prevented from attending secondary school should not become an accepted fact about Afghanistan simply because the ban has lasted for years. Women being pushed out of employment, universities, journalism, sport and public life should not become something governments learn to accommodate in their dealings with the Taliban.

There is now a growing international campaign, led by Afghan women and supported by lawyers, human-rights organisations and women’s-rights advocates around the world, to have gender apartheid recognised and codified as a crime against humanity under international law.

Gender apartheid is not currently expressly codified as a standalone international crime. Campaigners argue that the systematic segregation and subordination of women and girls requires explicit legal recognition, and negotiations surrounding a proposed UN convention on crimes against humanity have created an opportunity for governments to address that gap. UN human-rights experts have also called for Afghan women to have a central role in those discussions.

We Don’t Talk About That: Five Years of Taliban Rule

To mark the anniversary, a special collaborative episode of We Don’t Talk About That brings together women working directly with these issues.

For this episode, host Linda Coogan Byrne steps back and the conversation is led by guest Sangeeta Kalsi, development editor at Fourth Wave Feminist Magazine.

Their guests are Zahra Joya, Afghan journalist and founder and editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, and Akriti Saraswat, Protection Officer for Safety and Gender at Free Press Unlimited.

Zahra founded Rukhshana Media to ensure that the experiences of Afghan women remained part of the public record. Now working from exile, she leads an organisation whose female journalists continue reporting from inside Afghanistan despite the considerable risks involved.

Akriti works internationally with journalists facing violence, persecution, displacement and gender-based threats. Her work also shows how complicated journalist protection can be. Getting someone out of immediate physical danger does not solve everything that follows. Journalists in exile can face displacement, financial insecurity, trauma, immigration difficulties and the loss of the professional networks that allowed them to do their work in the first place.

Together, Zahra, Akriti and Sangeeta discuss what five years of Taliban rule have meant for women and girls, the removal of women from education, employment and public life, the dangers facing female journalists, exile, trauma and the international community’s failure to hold the Taliban accountable.

The episode is also a reminder that conversations about Afghanistan should include Afghan women themselves. They know what has happened to their country, what has been lost and what support is actually useful.

How can we help?

There are practical ways to support Afghan women and the organisations continuing to work alongside them.

• Rukhshana Media supports Afghan journalists reporting on the experiences of women and girls, including women reporting from inside Afghanistan. Support Rukhshana Media
• Free Press Unlimited supports journalists around the world and provides assistance to media workers facing threats, violence, persecution and displacement. Support Free Press Unlimited
• Malala Fund’s Afghanistan Initiative supports Afghan-led organisations working to keep girls learning and campaigns internationally for accountability over the treatment of Afghan women and girls. Support Malala Fund’s work in Afghanistan
• Afghanistan Education Action’s Herat Online School, supported by Children on the Edge, provides online education for students excluded from formal education, with women and girls making up the majority of its students. Support online education for Afghan women and girls
• Sahar Education provides education, digital skills, English, literacy and other programmes for Afghan girls and women. Support Sahar Education
• The Afghan Women’s Fund, established through Vital Voices, provides emergency assistance to Afghan women and girls at risk, including support with housing, resettlement and other urgent needs. Support the Afghan Women’s Fund
• UN Women continues working with women and women’s organisations inside Afghanistan and supporting programmes for Afghan women and girls. Support UN Women’s work in Afghanistan
• The international campaign to End Gender Apartheid is calling for gender apartheid to be recognised and codified under international law. Learn about the End Gender Apartheid campaign

Money is not the only way to help. People can write to their MPs, TDs, MEPs, foreign ministers and other elected representatives and ask what their governments are doing for Afghan women and girls. They can ask governments to support the recognition and codification of gender apartheid under international law, properly fund Afghan women’s organisations and independent media, and refuse political normalisation of Taliban rule that comes at the expense of women’s rights.

The fifth anniversary will bring Afghanistan back into newspapers, broadcasts and political conversations around the world. Then, inevitably, much of that attention will move elsewhere.

The girls who were removed from their classrooms in 2021 will still be there. They will simply be five years older.

Five years ago, governments around the world said Afghan women and girls would not be forgotten. There is no credible argument that their situation has improved since then. Supporting the journalists reporting what is happening, the organisations keeping girls connected to education and the women fighting for international accountability is one practical way of making sure those promises were more than words.

Image credit above: Photo: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) / Wikimedia Commons