Soon after returning to power last year, the Taliban banned secondary school for girls. She stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books. She used to wake up every morning and leave for school with her 12-year-old brother, but now she watches from the window as he boards the bus. She should be in ninth grade this year at Hussain Khail High School, where she loved her classes, even though the students had no chairs or tables and studied in hot, overcrowded tents. As with many of the women I spoke with for this story, I’m using only her first name to protect her privacy. Girls studying in a secret school in Afghanistan (Daniel Leal / AFP / Getty)į aryal is a 14-year-old girl in Kabul. I am a refugee in the United States now, but I have been talking with my family and friends, with former teachers and colleagues, to understand what they have been going through and what they want the rest of the world to know. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.īushra Seddique: My Escape from Afghanistan On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. Our mothers and grandmothers refer to these times as the “unblessed years.” They had prayed and protested for these rights. Women were no longer imprisoned at home-they were allowed to work, and would no longer be beaten if they chose not to wear the burqa.įreedom came too late for my mother and her generation. For Afghan women, the overthrow of the Taliban marked the beginning of a luckier time. I was born in 1999, two years before the September 11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of my country. I asked her: What did she hope would happen now? “ Hich omid nist,” she said. We had a family.” Now, she said, “we have nothing.”Īfghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman. But they soon lost their jobs, and the Taliban erased the rights women had gained over the previous two decades.Īn Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name. She and her husband already had two sons and were happy to be welcoming a daughter. Hajera is 35 and worked as a government economist. H ajera gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in Kabul two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer.
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