Afghan women detail five years of Taliban restrictions in rare interviews

Five years ago this month, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and took control of a country they had not fully held since 2001. The speed of their advance shocked everyone—foreign militaries, Afghan government officials, ordinary people watching from their homes. Within weeks, they had consolidated power across all of Afghanistan, something they had failed to do even during their first brutal reign in the 1990s. What followed was not a pause or a settling-in period. It was a systematic, escalating campaign to strip away the freedoms of women and girls, documented in a timeline of restrictions that reads like a narrowing corridor, each door closing after the last.

The restrictions began with education. In September 2021, schools reopened for boys. Girls were not invited back. By December 2022, universities were closed to women entirely. But the Taliban did not stop there. They moved into the realm of the body and the public sphere. In May 2022, women were ordered to cover themselves completely—head to toe, with only the eyes visible. By November that year, women were barred from parks, gyms, swimming pools, and public baths. In July 2023, beauty salons were shut down. In August 2024, a new law was enacted that made it illegal for women to raise their voices in public. The restrictions kept coming, each one narrowing the space where women could exist.

The economic and professional dimensions followed. In December 2024, women were banned from midwife and nursing training—cutting them off from healthcare professions. That same month, the Taliban issued a blanket ban on all non-governmental organizations from employing Afghan women, eliminating a major source of work for those who had managed to find employment outside the home. In September 2025, Afghan women were banned from visiting UN headquarters. And in May 2026, a law was codified that effectively legalized child marriage by treating the silence of a minor girl as consent to marriage.

The Taliban emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan, born from the chaos following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. They first seized power in 1996, ruling until a US-led military coalition removed them in 2001. Twenty years of war followed—tens of thousands killed, millions displaced—before the group returned to power in August 2021. The ideology that drove them then drives them now: an austere interpretation of Islamic law known as Sharia, enforced through a strict moral code that has historically included public executions of those convicted of murder and adultery.

The BBC began reaching out to women across Afghanistan to document what these five years have meant. They spoke to jewellery makers, students, former journalists—women from Kabul to the countryside, all ages, all walks of life. All of them have lived under these restrictions. All of them have watched their world contract. Many refused to use their real names, fearing reprisals from the Taliban or from their own communities. The restrictions have made it dangerous to tell their stories at all.

What emerges from these conversations is not a single narrative but a landscape of loss. Girls over twelve cannot attend school. Women cannot travel long distances without a male relative accompanying them. They cannot work for NGOs. They cannot train to be nurses or midwives. They cannot visit the United Nations. They cannot speak loudly in public. And now, under the new marriage law, girls can be married off with their silence treated as permission. The restrictions do not exist in isolation—they compound, they intersect, they create a system in which women's agency, mobility, and future have been systematically dismantled by law.