'Everything has changed for the worse': Afghan women reveal hardships living under hardline Taliban

By ITV News Producer Michael Maitland-Jones and Mohammad Noman 

When Amina was young she dreamed of playing her part in a happy and healthy society.

“My goal was to become a pharmacist, serving my community,” she tells ITV News from Afghanistan.

“I had good friends, and our teachers were kind and supportive.”

Amina is not her real name, though.

The former University of Balkh student is speaking to ITV News under condition of anonymity, silenced by the Taliban regime which took over the country in August 2021 and at a stroke ended the dreams of so many women like Amina.

“Since 2021 everything has changed for the worse,” she said. “I spend my entire day at home because universities are shut down. We have lost our right to education and are kept away from opportunities.”

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Three years since the Taliban takeover, thousands of Afghan women are living with the consequences of harsh new restrictions brought in by the authorities.

“Women and girls can’t make their own choices, not even in what they wear,” Amina explained.

Along with a ban from education, women are forced to conceal their faces and bodies outside of home and, most recently, forbidden in law from speaking in public.

Amina said of all the rights she has lost, it is her daily studies she misses the most.

“The future of an individual is tied closely to their knowledge and learning,” she said.

The draconian laws passed by the Taliban have been met with resistance from some women in the country, with protestors taking to the street and some posting defiant messages to social media.

Zholia Parsi, a young mother and activist, joined a demonstration in late 2023 against the Taliban’s education ban.

She told ITV News she was arrested by the authorities who also took her son into custody.

“They confiscated my daughters’ mobile phones and pressured me to reveal the identities of other women activists,” she said.

“For the first 20 days of my imprisonment, my family had no knowledge of my whereabouts. I was physically assaulted and put under huge psychological pressure.

“After three months, I was finally released, thanks to the guarantees provided by my relatives.”

Zholia arrived in Pakistan four months ago, where she now lives in exile, but says her situation is still fraught with danger.

“I live in constant fear for my safety. The physical abuse I suffered at the hands of the Taliban has left me with permanent injuries,” she said.

“I don’t have full use of my hands and feet, and I’ve lost my hearing in one ear… My imprisonment has left me unable to even hold a pen.”

She says that her ongoing treatment is expensive and she doesn’t foresee a return to Afghanistan soon or any change in prospects for women there.

“During the previous era, I had a stable job, and life was relatively normal. But everything has changed. They have lost everything.”

Zholia’s situation is far from unique.

Thousands of Afghans have left the country, according to Dr Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at The Royal United Services Institute.

He told ITV News the mass exodus included “many women… especially educated women”.

“There has been a wave of migration and that has reduced the size of the middle class. With no education it’s a matter of time before the middle class loses its female component.”

Dr Giustozzi said if Afghanistan continues along its current course of hardline religious law, it is likely that its society will, in effect, revert to the past.

“More women, if they get the chance, will leave the country,” he said.

“That will change Afghanistan sociologically, it will bring it back to the 1950s essentially, before women started making significant strides in education [and] before the legal reforms of the last 10, 15 years.”

Change may not be impossible, however, as not everyone in Afghanistan’s government is in favour of the strict decrees that are disproportionately affecting younger women.

According to Dr Giustozzi, infighting is rife inside the current administration.

“On the one hand, there are the original Taliban supporters of Clerical [religious] government,” he says.

“Then you have people who are not really Taliban, they joined the Taliban, but they come from other backgrounds… They believe in certainly Islamic law, but they believe there shouldn’t be mullahs [religious leaders] around the country.”

It is the latter group that are considered to be less in favour of some of the decrees issued by the current government, yet that dissent is far from dissuading those in power.

The future, for young Afghan women like Amina, remains a stark one.

“Now I hope for time to pass quickly, hoping that one day things will return to how they were before,” she said.

But - given the rare opportunity to speak freely in anonymity - she is not optimistic.

“Right now women are seen as a burden. Their voices are not heard.”

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