Five Years Later: The World Cannot Look Away from Afghan Women.
On August 15, 2001, the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan collapsed, and President Ashraf Ghani left the country. As Graeme Smith, writing for the International Crisis Group in 2024, explains, “The insurgents had been fighting the foreign troops for most of twenty years. Their victory put a stop to peace talks between their leadership and other Afghan factions. The Taliban soon declared a new government…Millions of Afghans struggled to survive that first winter under Taliban rule, with the state teetering on the brink of failure, civil servants going without salaries and the national currency plummeting in value.”
While the immediate post-takeover risk of state collapse and currency freefall has eased, aggregate economic stability has not meant recovery for ordinary Afghans. About 3.7 million returnees have increased pressure on jobs, housing, services, and food supplies; GDP per capita fell an estimated 5.6%.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For women and girls in Afghanistan, the situation has only become more and more dire, and the world watches on in relative silence. In five years, the headlines have faded, and the attention has turned elsewhere — but their suffering does not ease.
In 2021, when I was at VOICE, we documented Taliban Policies Restricting Women’s Rights since August 2021. The list was last updated in 2022 with 34 examples, including:
- Decree ordering imams to compile lists of unmarried women between 12–45 for Taliban fighters to marry
- Ban on girls’ secondary education
- Ban on dramas, soap operas, and entertainment shows featuring women; women news presenters required to wear a headscarf.s
- Forced face covering in public for women
The situation has only continued to worsen with each passing year, bringing new and more severe restrictions. In January 2026, a new criminal-procedure code narrowed the legal definition of domestic violence to “excessive” beating, leaving survivors of many other forms of violence without meaningful legal protection or a path to justice.
In March, the ban on Afghan women accessing UN facilities had continued for 205 days, including for staff, contractors, and visitors. In the same month, the new school year opened with the ban on education beyond sixth grade still in force for a fifth consecutive year. UNESCO estimates that about 2.4 million girls have been excluded from secondary education since 2021. Crackdowns on women-led protests, including detention, enforced disappearance allegations, torture and other ill-treatment, and retaliation against activists and journalists continue.
As of August 2026, Afghanistan remains the only country formally barring girls and women from education beyond the primary level. No major Taliban decree restricting women and girls since 2021 has been repealed, and the cumulative system reaches education, work, movement, dress, health care, justice, public presence, speech, and political participation.
In November 2022, VOICE published the report “Taking Myself out of the Darkness: Afghan Women Human Rights Defenders’ Fight for Recognition”, where one of the women told us: “Listen to us and use the organisations and structures we have built in the last 20 years for consulting and supporting us to facilitate women’s consultation and mobilisation, but do not take away our jobs. Let us and help us to present our needs instead of representing us.”
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How little notice have we taken of this as the world, as women activists, as the humanitarian advocates in the last few years, I wonder? We are not nearly outraged enough.
The Taliban’s systematic exclusion of Afghan women and girls constitutes gender apartheid: an institutionalised system of domination designed to segregate women from public life and deny them equal rights based on sex. The restrictions that have increased over the last five years are not isolated or temporary; together, they form a comprehensive legal and social order that enforces women’s dependency and erases their equal participation in society. Naming it gender apartheid recognises both the scale and the intentional, structural nature of this persecution — and underscores the international responsibility to challenge it.
The world must not turn away from Afghanistan simply because the crisis has become prolonged or politically difficult. Afghan women and girls are not asking to be saved from afar; they are demanding the right to learn, work, move freely, speak, organise and shape their country’s future.
We can stand with them by listening to and amplifying Afghan women’s leadership, funding women-led organisations directly and flexibly, protecting activists and human-rights defenders at risk, and refusing to accept women’s exclusion as the price of diplomatic engagement or humanitarian access.
I share the words of my dear friend and sister Yalda Royan from Afghanistan, who was forced to flee in 2021 with her two young daughters: “Five years since the fall of Afghanistan, and I still don’t know what I mourn most: the country we lost, the women erased from public life, the girls denied a future, or the hope that died quietly within us.
Perhaps the deepest sorrow is loving a homeland you were never given the chance to truly live in”
Every government, donor, institution and individual has a role: keep Afghanistan visible, challenge the normalisation of gender apartheid, support survivor-centred services and education, and insist that no conversation about Afghanistan takes place without Afghan women at the table.
