“The women are now asking me to help them leave the country. They don’t want to stay in Afghanistan any longer.” The establishment of the Islamic emirate Hundreds of thousands of people have fled Afghanistan since the Taliban took control last year, many during a chaotic US-led airlift to Kabul airport. Former President Ashraf Ghani fled, leaving behind a panicked nation. At least two weeks later, on August 26, an explosion outside the airport killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. workers helping with the evacuation. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blast. Many Afghans have long feared a violent Taliban takeover, a deep fear fueled by memories of the Islamic emirate in 1996, when former president Mohammad Najibullah – who was overthrown in 1992 – was hanged and his body put on public display, and when the Afghans and the country were harassed and killed. This time, the Taliban did not come in by force and promised a peaceful transition. However, many Afghans did not welcome their new rulers, who swept across the country, seizing former US bases and setting up their own checkpoints.
Doctors and nurses during their morning rounds at a Kabul hospital in February 2022. Although fewer people arrived at the hospital with war-related injuries, more people showed up with gunshot wounds.
Economic and humanitarian crisis The establishment of the Islamic emirate triggered an international response that has since crippled the Central Asian country: development aid has been halted, foreign reserves frozen and sanctions are mounting. The economy collapsed and a humanitarian crisis ensued. Most household incomes fell below the poverty line and the economy shrank by almost 30%.
Noor Agha, 10, picks up trash in Kabul to help his family pay for food. Child labor has increased since the Taliban took over. Right: a woman in Herat shows a photo of her sick son – unable to afford medical treatment.
“No country in the world could have absorbed such a huge economic shock,” said William Byrd, senior Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace. “The new balance leaves most of the Afghan population – up to 70% – unable to afford food and other basic necessities.” Schools near high school girls. protests are increasing, journalists are being tortured Afghanistan has endured more than four decades of war, including 20 years of US occupation. Since the Taliban takeover, large-scale fighting has virtually stopped, mobility across the country has improved and corruption has declined. At the same time, women have been denied basic rights – including the right to higher education – and several former government officials have been killed by the Taliban, according to Human Rights Watch. Tens of thousands of Afghans remain stranded, both in Afghanistan – still awaiting evacuation each year – and in refugee camps abroad where their future is unknown.
Women in Dasht-e-Barchi protest against the new all-male interim Taliban government, demanding women’s rights and education, in September 2021.
Protests broke out across the country when the Taliban announced that many girls would no longer be able to go to school. Several journalists covering the protests were arrested and beaten, including Nehmatullah Maqdi, 28, and Taqi Daryabi, 22.
Nehmatullah Maqdi, 28, and Taqi Daryabi, 22, video journalists for EtilaatRoz newspaper, were beaten by the Taliban after they were arrested while filming a women’s rights demonstration.
Gobind Singh, 25, stands at the Sikh Gurdwara in Kabul, where Islamic State launched an attack on the minority community. Two people were killed, but the attackers barely missed the worshipers – as many as 70 of them were due to arrive minutes later.
Increase in attacks on minorities There has been a sharp increase in IS attacks against the Hazara people, a Shiite minority. At least 72 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a Shiite mosque in the northern province of Kunduz in October 2021. Days later, a similar attack in Kandahar killed 63 people, mostly Hazara. In April, a prominent Afghan high school in a Hazara neighborhood in western Kabul was targeted, killing at least nine students and wounding dozens more. Ramazan Ali told the Guardian that his son Ali was 18 when he was murdered. He was a “good student and promising athlete.”
Ramazan Ali, 45, father of Ali, 18, who was killed in the attack at Kabul’s Abdul Rahim Shahid High School.
“We no longer feel safe. I have already lost my son and I am afraid that the suffering is not over. This is our home, but our community is not even represented in government. We are forced to abide by rules we don’t agree with, such as the ban on girls’ education,” says the 45-year-old as he sits on the floor in his home and holds a framed photo of his late son.
Men stand in the ruins of their homes in Paktika, where a magnitude 5.9 earthquake destroyed at least 35 villages, in June 2022.
In the spring and summer of this year, further IS attacks on minorities followed, including one at a Sikh place of worship in Kabul in July. A 5.9-magnitude earthquake that month killed more than 1,000 people, while dozens died in landslides and flash floods across the country. Back in the western Kabul neighborhood where Shamsa Gul works her “magic,” several of the women who visited the fortune teller say that while some people’s lives have improved since the Taliban takeover, theirs—like many other women’s – has not improved. There are no jobs and no education, Gul is told. “It’s true — the overall situation for women has gotten worse,” says Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Women live in fear and feel hopeless. There is no future for them under the Taliban.”
