Five years after the Taliban's swift return to Kabul, what has unfolded is not merely a change in government but a methodical erasure of women's place in public life — each restriction building upon the last, narrowing the space in which Afghan women and girls are permitted to exist. From the closure of schools to the codification of child marriage, the Taliban has moved with a speed and comprehensiveness that even their first reign did not achieve. Millions of women now live within a legal architecture designed to silence, confine, and erase them — and many risk reprisal simply for speaking a
Afghan women detail five years of Taliban restrictions in rare interviews
Millions of Afghan women and girls have lost access to education, employment, healthcare training, and fundamental freedoms; child marriage is now legally codified with minor girls' silence treated as consent.