Inside Taliban rule: BBC gains rare access to Afghanistan's leaders five years after takeover

Five years after sweeping back into power, the Taliban govern a country they have reshaped according to their interpretation of Islamic law—yet the men now running it seem caught between the image they want to project and the reality of what they have built. The BBC spent two years gaining unusual access to senior Taliban figures, watching them move through their days as administrators, military officers, and judges. What emerges is a portrait of contradiction: leaders who present themselves as reasonable while enforcing policies that have systematically excluded women from education, employment, and public life.

In a governor's office in northern Afghanistan, an 18-year-old woman sits behind a full-face veil and sunglasses, arguing her case for divorce. Her husband has beaten her for months. She speaks calmly and with conviction: "If there was any chance to live together, I wouldn't be here." Governor Abdullah Sarhadi, a grey-bearded former military commander, tries to dissuade her. He asks her who would marry her after a divorce, suggests she compromise, warns that she will lose her dignity. She responds that her dignity has already been destroyed. Later, in a room full of male officials and bodyguards, Sarhadi remarks that women are "mindless" and "deficient in intellect"—drawing laughter from the men around him. Under Taliban law, a woman seeking divorce without her husband's consent faces nearly impossible odds. Her family will have to pursue the case through the courts, knowing the system is stacked against them.

Sarhadi himself embodies the Taliban's continuity across decades. He was a military commander in the 1990s, when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and destroyed the ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan. He was captured when the US-led coalition ousted the group in 2001, held for years at Guantanamo Bay, then released. When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, he became a governor. When asked about the destruction of the Buddhas, he initially deflects, then says: "I destroyed it with my own hands. Whatever we did and we do is in accordance with the guidance and God's law. We smash idols rather than sell them. Why should I regret? It was God's will."

In Kabul, another senior official, Habibullah Badr, drives through the city in an armoured car. He was once "responsible for the operations of suicide attackers," he tells the BBC. Taliban suicide attacks killed thousands of people across Afghanistan, many of them civilians. When pressed about civilian deaths, Badr says the Taliban targeted US convoys and urged civilians to stay away from foreign bases. He becomes evasive when asked about specific attacks in civilian areas. He was once held on death row under the previous government; now he has held the position of deputy head of prisons for the entire country—running the very jail where he awaited execution.

At a tribal gathering where Badr is to be honoured with a medal, Sultan Mohammad Talaee, head of a charitable foundation, breaks the ceremonial silence. "Mr Badr is a pride for Afghanistan," he says, "but I also have a complaint. If the schools and education were open to all it would be a great work for Afghanistan." The room goes still. His microphone is swiftly removed. Later, Talaee tells the BBC he had requested that girls' schools reopen, citing Islamic teaching that seeking knowledge is an obligation for both men and women. "There were other things I wanted to say but they didn't let me talk more."

When the BBC meets with Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban government's spokesman, they sit in a lavish press centre that the Americans built for the previous government. Mujahid reveals his real name publicly for the first time: Tahir Shah Seddiqi. Two days after the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, he stood in this same room and told the world that women would be allowed to work and study "within our frameworks" and would "be very active" in society. The BBC asks why they failed to keep that promise. "We are committed to women's rights, freedom of speech and other things within Sharia," he replies. "We should see everything through the Sharia lens." Allowing women to work in offices like his would "lead to immoralities" and "their dignity would be undermined." On education, he says the issue is "under discussions" and they need "a Sharia-based solution for it."

The restrictions have only tightened. In Kandahar, the Taliban's heartland in the south, men must now have beards. Radio stations cannot play music or broadcast women's voices. The BBC was not permitted to film in the city. In the mountains outside Kandahar, former fighters showed journalists the cave networks where they once hid, firing from holes in the rock, storing their Qurans and rifles. One man, Abdul Samad, showed an unmarked graveyard where his father is buried, killed fighting for the Taliban. The area is among the most deprived in Afghanistan, where the UN reports that three in four people cannot meet their basic needs. Samad expressed hope that Taliban leaders would eventually attend to the region's desperate need for water, roads, and clinics.

Women who have lived under Taliban rule speak of despair. One woman, who protested when the Taliban first returned, told the BBC: "I'm speechless about how a group that has no understanding about life is suddenly in power." She believes the Taliban restrict women because they fear educated women. "They want uneducated women so they can't raise wise men. Because that would end the Taliban." Most journalists the BBC spoke to said they had been summoned or questioned by the Taliban's intelligence service. Friends of women the BBC interviewed had been jailed for protesting. Five years into Taliban rule, poverty, unemployment, and economic instability remain severe. The men in power say they are working to address these crises. But for many Afghans, the Taliban itself is the country's main problem.