The Taliban’s no.1 priority – crushing half the population
The Taliban has been back in power for five years and has introduced a brutally repressive regime against women. How long can it last?
Afghan burqa-clad women along with a girl walk along a street in Loy Viala village in Afghanistan’s Kandahar. Photo: Sanaullah SEIAM / AFP via Getty Images
“I remember Mullah Zaeef,” said Lyse Doucet, “one of the founders of the Taliban, saying to me a few years ago, ‘95% of the Taliban don’t agree with the most severe edicts. Yes, we’re conservative but we believe Islam gives girls the right to go to school’.”
Doucet is the BBC’s chief international correspondent and has reported on Afghanistan for 30 years. “They’re willing to speak out, some of them,” she said. But when it comes to confronting the hard line leadership on women’s rights: “they’re not willing”.
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime has now been back in power for five years. Despite returning the country to a brutally restrictive regime, it has won formal diplomatic recognition, complete with a security pact, from Russia. It has exchanged ambassadors with China. As of June, it is on speaking terms with the world’s largest trading bloc, the European Union.
All this has been achieved while Afghanistan’s hardline government has pursued the state-mandated erasure of women. Since 2021, girls have been excluded from school beyond grade six and women’s right to work restricted. In 2022, women were barred from public parks and gyms and in 2024, the Taliban even prohibited women from speaking audibly in public.
What hope is there that Afghanistan can ever get past “gender apartheid”…
