Five years after the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the country's roughly 22 million women and girls are living under one of the most sweeping systems of gender-based repression in modern history. More than 100 Taliban decrees have reshaped nearly every aspect of women's daily lives — banning girls from secondary school and women from universities, restricting freedom of movement, excluding women from most workplaces, outlawing their voices in public spaces, and resuming public corporal punishment including flogging. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are formally prohibited from continuing their education beyond Grade 6, a status that has persisted for nearly 1,800 days. Seven in ten Afghan women describe their mental health as bad or very bad, according to UN Women, and mental health professionals have described the situation as an epidemic of suicidal ideation.

The human cost is vivid and immediate. Women interviewed across Afghanistan describe lives they no longer recognise. A former television news anchor says she now spends her days baking bread and cleaning the house, having lost not just her job but, in her words, "part of my identity." A young woman who dreamed of becoming a pilot says she can only watch the sky. A midwife describes watching a mother of six die in childbirth after restrictions on male doctors left her without adequate care. A 20-year-old who was in Grade 10 when the Taliban returned says she now "lives blind" because she cannot imagine a future. Women who have been publicly flogged — including one woman lashed 39 times for befriending a man she hoped to marry — describe lasting trauma for themselves and their children. The Taliban's Supreme Court recorded 395 people subjected to public corporal punishment in 2025, including 78 women, though observers believe the true figure is substantially higher.

Beyond direct punishment, fear itself has become an instrument of control. Following the arrest of at least 30 women in the western city of Herat in June 2026 for alleged dress-code violations, women across Afghanistan began recalculating the risks of leaving home at all. More than half of the 3,200 women surveyed by UN Women now leave their homes only once or twice a month. A visit to a market or a medical appointment has become a calculation of personal risk rather than an ordinary act. The consequences extend beyond individual lives: a 2026 UNICEF analysis projects Afghanistan will lose up to 20,000 women teachers and 5,400 healthcare workers by 2030 as a result of education bans, at a cost already estimated at $84 million a year. With women now barred from nursing and midwifery training, the pipeline of female healthcare workers — essential in a system where religious rules restrict treatment by male doctors — is effectively closed.

The international response has drawn sharp criticism for falling short. The UN's $1.7 billion humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan is only 25 percent funded, and nearly three-quarters of women's organisations operating in the country have experienced funding cuts in 2025. UN Women warns that more than half of the 74 women's groups it surveyed are likely to suspend operations or close within the year. Meanwhile, the UN-led Doha diplomatic process, aimed at Afghanistan's eventual reintegration into international norms, has proceeded with Afghan women and civil society excluded from the main talks at the Taliban's insistence — a concession critics argue risks legitimising the very policies the process claims to oppose. A legal case invoking Afghanistan's obligations under CEDAW, the UN's convention on gender discrimination, was formally initiated in 2024 by Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, but has yet to reach the International Court of Justice — a contrast noted with the swifter pace of a comparable case against Syria. On Friday, 56 countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Germany, issued a joint statement at the UN calling on the Taliban to reverse its restrictions, describing the "systematic repression of women and girls" as "a defining feature of the current system."

Amid the restrictions, Afghan women have not been passive. Underground schools run from private homes have kept some girls learning. Women have organised street protests in Kabul as recently as February 2026, despite documented arrests, torture and killings in response. Researchers at Georgetown University have counted 264 Taliban decrees affecting human rights since 2021, 166 of them targeting women and girls specifically — a documentation effort driven largely by Afghan women's organisations themselves. "Speak up for Afghan women, support their right to education and work," one dental assistant told the BBC. "We need solidarity, not silence." Whether the international community will move beyond statements of concern to actions that carry real consequences for the Taliban remains, five years on, the defining unanswered question.