Five Years Under Taliban Rule: How Kabul Residents Navigate Strict New Restrictions

Five years after the Taliban's return to power, Kabul has become a city reshaped not by sudden rupture but by the slow accumulation of constraint — rules that govern where women may walk, what work is permitted, what futures are imaginable. NPR's on-the-ground reporting finds ordinary Afghans neither simply broken nor simply resigned, but engaged in the deeply human work of building meaning within circumstances they did not choose. It is a story as old as power itself: how people endure, adapt, and quietly insist on dignity when the world they knew has been remade around them.