There was an almost surreal quiet in the classroom at Kabul University on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 15. It was the start of the school week, and the financial-management professor had just begun answering questions posed by the students. Then, a young man burst through the doors, a look of frantic terror in his eyes.
“He told us that the Taliban have captured Kabul. He said, ‘they are coming here. Run!’” says Farah, one of the students, 24, recalling the moment. “I could not feel my hands and my feet, they were shaking,” she says. Farah, like every woman TIME spoke to for this story, asked to be identified by a pseudonym out of fear for their safety. “We just stood and started collecting all our notebooks,” she says.
That was the last time Farah saw her beloved university. In the two months since Afghanistan’s government collapsed, amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal after 20 years of war, thousands of Afghan girls and women have been shut out of their high schools and universities, their studies over and their lives and futures in flux.
Before the Taliban seized the capital without a fight, about half the 20,000 or so students at Kabul University, the country’s oldest university, were female. Women’s education was perhaps the single strongest sign of change and hope for the new Afghanistan. Over two decades, the U.S. spent about $1 billion on education for Afghan women and girls—with some marked success.
Yet despite Taliban assurances during negotiations with the U.S. that all Afghans would have a right to education, the new government has barred women from stepping foot on university and high-school campuses—a situation that shows no signs of ending,
despite pressure from Western governments. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid recently said they would be allowed to resume their studies when there is “an environment where female students are protected.” That has strong echoes of the Taliban banning girls from education during their rule over Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.
