Afghanistan: Afghan Women Are Already Fading From Public View as Fear of the Taliban and Uncertainty Prevail

Aug 19, 2021 | Margherita Stancati and Jessica Donati
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Dr. Zuhal used to drive herself to work.

This week, she started taking a taxi to avoid reprisals from the Taliban, who once banned women from driving. It didn’t help. On the second day of the Taliban takeover, a Taliban gunman dragged the doctor, who didn’t want to use her full name, out of the taxi and whipped her for filming the chaos surrounding the evacuations at the Kabul airport through her window.

“I cried the whole way home,” she said.

Since seizing control of Afghanistan, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than when they were last in power in the 1990s, when their hard-line interpretation of Sunni Islam and their treatment of women helped make them a pariah state.