Foreign correspondent
Women who remain in the country are desperately trying to mobilise either by protesting or finding alternative methods to educate themselves and girls over the age of 12 who have been banned from high school. Nazanin – not her real name for security reasons – initially fled to Pakistan, where she spent four months trying to seek asylum in the United States. She was told to arrange for a passport from Kabul. She returned to find many heartbroken female relatives worried their future would be bleak without formal education.
Nazanin was only four when the US-led invasion took place in 2001. She spent the next 20 years getting an education, going to university and eventually working as an actor. Her mother wanted to ensure that Nazanin and her three sisters weren’t deprived of an education like she was.
“I had heard stories from my mother about life under Taliban rule in the 1990s but never did I imagine, in my wildest dreams, that we would go through what she experienced. We thought those dark days were over.”
Nazanin’s mother also told her about secret schools that were established in basements so girls and women could educate themselves. Nazanin decided that’s exactly what she would do.
On the day I went to visit her, the streets of Kabul were covered in snow. The conditions were freezing, sometimes minus 19 degrees. Nazanin gently opened the front gate and peered out. She quickly let us in so not to draw attention from neighbours. We managed to smuggle our camera in and moved down to her basement. There we found more than 12 young
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girls, sitting around a gas cylinder which was providing some heating.
Nazanin had no experience teaching but something was better than nothing. The girls ranged in age from 12 to 16 years. The subject that morning was biology. While they were quietly taking turns to answer their teachers’ questions it was clear they understood the risks they were taking.
“I worry when I travel here every morning,” one 15-year-old told me. “My family are pressuring me not to come. But I have to keep learning. I find it so painful that they aren’t allowing us to return to our schools. This decision is against Islam. It is illegal.”
With the Taliban crackdowns, running this secret school is now very dangerous. If caught, Nazanin and her family could be detained. It’s a risk she believes is worth taking. “The Taliban maintain that this ban is temporary. But that’s what they said last time they ran the country – and that ban lasted the full five years they were in power.”
As I prepared to leave the country I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was to have a foreign passport, and how different my life would have been had my parents not fled. It’s difficult not to think about all the human talent whose contribution the world will never see – the doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists – because they happened to be born female in Afghanistan. The Taliban always maintained that this time would be different, that they’d changed. Now, millions of girls and women across the country have no future.
Afghanistan is the only country on Earth where the rights of women have been rolled back so savagely, so quickly. The only place on Earth where girls are denied an education as a matter of state policy. AWW