Nearly five years after the Taliban banned secondary and higher education for girls in Afghanistan, a quiet resistance is growing in Kabul, where women are running clandestine underground schools to keep the next generation learning. In one such school, hidden in a basement behind thick curtains on an unmarked street, a founder identified only as Farimah now teaches hundreds of teenage girls who found the school by word of mouth, with their families and community keeping the secret to protect them. The women running these schools face imprisonment or worse if discovered, while girls denied access to education increasingly face forced early marriage — a fate that has surged even in Afghan cities since the Taliban's return to power in 2021.