After the Taliban’s Media Crackdown, What Remains of Afghanistan’s Women’s Movement?
CBC’s report of journalists disappearing under Taliban pressure lands in a country where women and girls have been forced from classrooms, clinics, and public life and yet a quiet, defiant movement persists.
3 Narratives News | October 23, 2025
“Being a woman in Afghanistan is like being a second-class citizen — or worse.”
The journalist who said this, Zahra Joya, runs Rukhshana Media from exile. Her reporters still file stories, often at night, shifting phones and safe houses whenever a new decree or detention ripples across Kabul. “We refuse to be erased,” she says.
From 9/11 to today
After the September 11, 2001, attacks in which nearly 3,000 people were killed when hijacked planes struck New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the United States vowed to dismantle al-Qaeda and those who sheltered it. The Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, prompting a U.S.-led coalition to launch Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001. The goal was to destroy al-Qaeda’s network and remove the Taliban regime that protected it.
NATO allies soon joined under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and foreign troops remained in Afghanistan for two decades. In April 2021, the United States announced a complete withdrawal. By August 15, 2021, the Taliban had retaken Kabul, and the last American soldiers left the country on August 31, 2021 marking the end of America’s longest war. Pritzker Military Museum; Council on Foreign Relations; Reuters timeline.
When the Taliban fell in 2001, something unfamiliar began to stir in Afghanistan: hope for women. For the first time in decades, girls carried schoolbooks through the dust of Kabul’s morning streets. Female teachers returned to classrooms that had been silent since the 1990s. By 2021, that simple act of a girl walking to school had become one of the most visible symbols of national rebirth.
UNESCO’s figures tell the story behind those footsteps. In 2001, only a handful of women, roughly five thousand, were enrolled in universities. Two decades later, more than one hundred thousand studied medicine, law, and engineering. Millions of girls filled primary classrooms that had once been shuttered. From these schools came Afghanistan’s first generation of women lawyers, doctors, athletes, and journalists, women who no longer asked permission to speak, but simply did.
Then, in August 2021, as American planes lifted from Kabul’s airport, everything that had seemed permanent began to vanish. Within weeks, the Taliban issued decree after decree: girls were barred from secondary school, universities were closed to women, and most forms of paid work were outlawed. Even parks and gyms, the few places where women could breathe freely, were declared off-limits without a male guardian.
The United Nations and rights groups now use a phrase once reserved for the darkest regimes of the twentieth century: gender apartheid, a system built not on spontaneous prejudice, but on the deliberate exclusion of half the population from education, work, and public life.
By 2025, the walls had grown tighter still. UNAMA’s mid-year report confirmed that no girl could legally attend secondary or higher education. Jobs for women were scarce and often dangerous to hold. In the northern province of Balkh, local authorities went further, banning fibre-optic internet, a move that severed the digital lifelines women had built for remote study and home-based work.
And where there is silence, there is fear. Afghanistan’s once-vibrant media has been gutted. By early 2024, only a few dozen female journalists were still working in Kabul down from hundreds before the city fell in August 2021, according to TIME and The Guardian. Stations such as Radio Begum, one of the country’s few women-run broadcasters, were raided and forced off the air in February 2025. After mounting international pressure, the station briefly resumed broadcasting, but the message to women in media was unmistakable: speak softly, or risk everything.
Meanwhile, violence against women has intensified. Investigators with the open-source project Afghan Witness documented more than 330 killings of women since the Taliban seized power a figure researchers believe represents only a fraction of the real toll, as many cases go unreported. Genocide Watch called these deaths “the visible tip of a much deeper iceberg.”
The regime has also imposed harsh dress codes. A decree issued on May 7, 2022, by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice requires women to cover themselves from head to toe including their faces, and punishes male relatives if they fail to enforce compliance. Amnesty International reports that women found outside the home without a male guardian, or wearing what officials deem “improper” clothing, risk detention, beating, or disappearance.
What was once exclusion has become a system of control, one that silences, surveils, and punishes women for simply existing in public.
What Women Accomplished During the 2001–2021 Period
From the ruins of war-weary Kabul to the halls of new universities, Afghan women wrote a story of renewal. After the fall of the Taliban’s first regime in 2001, doors that had been locked for decades slowly opened. Under the interim government and the 2004 constitution, women gained new rights: the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission was created, and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was established, ensuring women participated in national decision-making. Feminist Majority Foundation
At universities, women were enrolled in fields once unimaginable. A UN photo-essay notes several women held high-profile public offices for example, Adela Raz served as Afghanistan’s Permanent Representative to the U.N. and then as Ambassador to the U.S. UN Media. In parliament, by 2021, women held 69 of 249 seats. UN Women
The workplace and public life also changed: women became doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and journalists. A Brookings analysis noted women’s empowerment was seen not only as a moral imperative but a key driver of economic progress. Brookings By many measures, twenty years of U.S.-led state-building saw “indisputable gains especially in education and maternal health.” SIGAR
It was messy, incomplete, and uneven. Rural areas lagged far behind, but the message was clear: Afghan women were no longer invisible. They had entered public life, shaped institutions, built businesses, sat in courts, and reported stories.
What Life Is Like for Women Today in Afghanistan
When the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says girls and women are banned from secondary and tertiary education, that is not abstract. It is the life story of a 17-year-old girl like Hana, who once went to a library or café and now
“can’t even think about leaving the house unless my brother or father comes with me.”
Movement & Travel
Women’s ability to move through the world has been tightly constricted. According to reporting in The Guardian, Hasina, a divorced mother, cannot send her daughters to school, and she cannot even leave her district for medical help because she has no male “guardian” (mahram). Taliban rules state that a woman travelling more than 75 km must be accompanied by a male relative. The Guardian
Dress & Public Appearance
New decrees mandate that women must cover themselves from head to toe, including their faces, when in public. Male relatives are held legally responsible if they fail to enforce compliance. Amnesty International UK
A civil-society activist, Shamail Zarei, said:
“Since the Taliban took power, I was hiding, and I could not do what I was doing before. There is no future for me and millions of other women and girls.” Amnesty International UK
Work, Education & Public Life
The gains of the previous two decades have largely been erased in the public sphere. Women are barred from many jobs; the vast majority of universities remain closed to them; and public spaces once accessible to women, such as gyms, parks, and salons, are forbidden or tightly controlled. The NGO report No One Hears Our Voices puts it simply:
“Women in Afghanistan are surviving, we are not living.” Women for Women International
Healthcare & Aid
Even healthcare access is hindered. In September 2025, the World Health Organization called for female aid workers in Afghanistan to be permitted to travel without male escorts to reach women needing care after a major earthquake. Reuters
Rights, Reality & Resistance
Human-rights observers characterize the present moment as among the worst in the world for women.
“This isn’t a dystopian novel … it’s Afghanistan right now, and the Taliban’s crackdown on women and girls is steadily deepening.” — Human Rights Watch
These restrictions are not cosmetic or isolated, as they reflect a system of government that aims to remove women from sight, from voice, from possibility. Many now live in a world of permission, not rights; of waiting, not advancing; of guarding silence, not giving testimony.
The Silent Story — A Movement That Refuses to Vanish
Beneath the geopolitics, Afghan women persist. They film quiet protests, move classes into living rooms, and keep reporting. Rukhshana Media documents spray-painted slogans and whispered study circles.
“It’s important for the world to see how Afghan women are powerful,”
Joya says. Rukhshana Media; The Diplomat.
The data align with what they risk for: a UN Women brief finds 92% of Afghans support girls’ secondary schooling, even as bans persist. Experts like Heather Barr at Human Rights Watch and UN officials argue the world should codify gender apartheid as a crime to build practical tools for accountability and support. UN Women (Aug 2025).
There is tragedy here, too. When nursing and midwifery programs shut, maternal health suffers; when women’s radio goes dark, information lifelines die; when journalists disappear, communities lose watchdogs. In October 2025, Abdul Ghafor Abed was killed on assignment near the Pakistan border, a reminder that the fight to report is often fatal. CPJ; UNESCO.
What the Women’s Movement Built — and What’s Left
By 2021, millions of Women had cycled through primary school, and tens of thousands were in universities; females held parliamentary seats; women-led media flourished. Those gains did not reach everyone, but they seeded expectations that are hard to erase. Today’s underground classrooms and encrypted newsrooms are the movement’s afterlife not because the free world made things worse by caring, but because it left before the project was secure and now hesitates to back women directly at scale. UNESCO.
Are women being killed for seeking rights or education? Rights groups and Afghan outlets document detentions, beatings, enforced disappearances, and killings during crackdowns on protests and reporting. Journalism under Taliban rule carries a lethal risk, and efforts to keep girls in school have been met with intimidation and violence. UN officials characterize the pattern as systemic persecution and increasingly as gender apartheid. CPJ database; UN/OHCHR remarks.
Further reading: UNAMA quarterly human-rights updates; UN Women gender alerts; Rukhshana Media’s on-the-ground reporting; CPJ’s Afghanistan updates. For our editorial standards and corrections policy, see 3N Corrections & Editorial Standards. Related coverage: More on Afghanistan.
Key Takeaways
- 2001–2021 saw measurable gains for Afghan women in schooling, higher education, and public life; many gains were urban and fragile. UNESCO
- Since 2021, Taliban decrees have amounted to what UN experts call “gender apartheid,” excluding women from education, work, and public life. UN experts · UN Women
- Media repression is integral to this system; women-run outlets have been suspended or forced underground. CPJ · AP
- Despite crackdowns, Afghan women continue to organize, educate, and report — and urge formal recognition of gender apartheid as a crime. UN Women · UN experts
- Policy debate splits between conditioning engagement on rights benchmarks and pursuing pragmatic openings that keep services and learning alive. CFR
Questions This Article Answers
How much did women’s education improve after 2001?
UNESCO notes that women in higher education rose from about 5,000 in 2001 to over 100,000 in 2021; girls’ primary enrollment expanded from near zero to the vast majority in class. UNESCO
Why do UN officials and rights groups use the term “gender apartheid”?
Because Taliban rule is systemic, state-imposed segregation and exclusion of women from education, work, and public life — fitting the elements of segregation and persecution described by UN experts. UN experts · UN Women
What’s happening to journalists now?
Detentions and suspensions continue; women-run Radio Begum was raided and suspended (later allowed to resume). In October 2025, a local TV reporter, Abdul Ghafor Abed, was killed on assignment. CPJ · AP · CPJ
Is there Afghan support for girls’ education?
Yes. A UN Women brief (Aug 2025) finds 92% of Afghans support girls’ secondary schooling despite the bans. UN Women
What can the world do that actually helps?
Fund women-led groups and media directly, set verifiable rights benchmarks for any engagement, maintain humanitarian access, and work to codify gender apartheid as a crime to create enforcement tools. UN experts
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