“I feel like I am in prison, but I don’t know what crime I committed.” After five years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, this is the testimony of an Afghan woman with whom Fereshta Abbasi recently spoke, as part of her work as a human rights violations researcher in the Asian country for Human Rights Watch. For a decade, Abbasi has been documenting abuses in the area for various organizations. Today, she states in conversation with La Tercera that the situation with the regime has reached a critical point.
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After the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in 2021, the same Taliban that President George W. Bush removed from power in 2001 took full control of the country. The collapse of the interim government was a consequence of the Doha Agreement signed by Donald Trump and the jihadist movement the previous year, when an attempt was made to end two decades of conflict, the longest war in which the United States has been involved.
This Friday, “after five years of Taliban rule, Afghanistan suffers one of the worst human rights crises. And the worst women’s rights crisis in the world,” Abbasi states.
In its rise, the radical movement imposed a strict interpretation of sharia, Islamic law. Currently, the researcher explains, this is reflected in that “it is the only country where women and girls do not have access to secondary and higher education. In addition, they face severe employment restrictions and have no freedom of movement.”
Although women and girls are the main victims, the situation affects the entire society. “The population has no freedom of assembly or association. We have documented cases of arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearance of journalists, human rights activists, and former government officials,” she adds.
Alongside the human rights crisis, there is a growing humanitarian crisis. According to the United Nations, 14 million residents of the country face acute food insecurity. And since 2023, the country’s situation has worsened due to the massive arrival of deportees from Pakistan – at war with the Taliban since February – and Iran.
According to Jelena Bjelica, co-director and senior analyst at Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), “what in 2021 seemed, and was presented, as a series of temporary restrictions has resulted in an institutionalized system that regulates education, employment, mobility, clothing, access to public spaces, and participation in public life.”
Currently, the rules have a different estimate: “The important point, after five years, is that these measures no longer seem temporary,” Bjelica maintains.
According to Thomas Barfield, president of the American Institute of Afghan Studies and scholar at Boston University, “women were making great progress in the 20 years of the Republic. That completely collapsed.”
Barfield, a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, first visited Afghanistan in 1971. Since then, Afghan society has been his main field of study.
“The UN has called it gender apartheid, and it is,” the researcher states. “If you believe in gender segregation, you need female doctors and administrators to attend to women, but the Taliban do not allow them to receive training.”
In the first Taliban rule, which began in 1996 and ended in 2001, the movement did not achieve full control over Afghanistan. “Now they have much more power,” Barfield explains. “And now that they control the entire country, they can force people to do things their way.”
For Abbasi, “Afghanistan, even before 2021, has always been one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman.” However, “we had this platform from which we could fight,” she adds. “In five years, what we lost is hope and the platform to fight for a better future.”
On the other hand, Bjelica states that “women were present – although unevenly and imperfectly – in government, education, employment, politics, and public life, but they have been systematically excluded from most of these spaces.” “They have no formal political representation,” she adds. “Girls are prohibited from education beyond sixth grade, and women from university. They are excluded from most government jobs and many other forms of paid employment.”
The measures, Barfield explains, originate from the mullahs, the Taliban’s religious leaders. They dictate their interpretation of Islam from the country’s second most populous city: Kandahar, the birthplace of the movement that governs the country.
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The anthropologist maintains that their vision of Islamism is not shared by the entire society, not even by all the Taliban: “People already believe they are excellent Muslims, they don’t like to receive advice.” “It is not in countries like Pakistan or Iran where the clergy says: ‘Things have gone wrong because we have become too Westernized.’ Especially in rural areas of Afghanistan, they consider their religious beliefs totally correct and do not like being told how they should practice them,” he points out.
On the other hand, Abbasi states that it is important not to portray the country’s women only as victims, “because they are resisting and must be treated as agents of change.” In much of Afghanistan, women’s groups have developed informal schools to counter the teaching ban.
Regarding society in general, Abbasi says, the prevailing feeling is disappointment. “When I talk to people from Afghanistan, no one holds hope for a better future under the Taliban regime. It is a very dark picture,” she says.
The last conversation the researcher had with an Afghan citizen was with “a man who was tortured by the Taliban,” she says. “And it has been very difficult to erase his words from my mind. The way they tortured him… He was a young man who was basically tortured for expressing his opinion. When I spoke with him, he was very traumatized,” she adds.
The daily life of families in the country is marked by hunger, Abbasi explains. “I have spoken with parents who have lost their children due to malnutrition. With families who basically said they had nothing to eat that day.”
Another manifestation of the crisis is massive unemployment. According to Sosan Hashimi, director of Beyond Borders Empowerment – which provides humanitarian assistance to refugees from Afghanistan and other countries – “there are hundreds of people in my network, with whom I speak daily, who have been fired from their jobs or replaced by Taliban soldiers with no experience.”
One reason for unemployment is the cut in foreign funding. “Historically, the Afghan government has depended on international aid,” Barfield explains. “When the government collapsed, 40% of Afghanistan’s GDP corresponded to foreign aid, and they lost most of that immediately,” he maintains. The United States, which was the main donor, reduced its contributions to zero in January 2025.
A factor that worsens this situation, Bjelica explains, is that “during the last five years Afghanistan ceased to be mainly a country of emigration to become the scene of one of the largest episodes of forced return in the world.” In this context, “despite still being unable to absorb a large number of returnees, the country has received about 6.3 million people who were pressured to leave neighboring Pakistan and Iran,” she adds.
“For most of them, returning to Afghanistan does not represent the end of displacement, but rather the beginning of a new period of uncertainty,” she adds. In Abbasi’s experience, the deportees, “even after six months, still did not have a job, still did not have shelter, did not have access to drinking water, and did not have access to health services.
For Filippo Boni, an expert in International Relations at the Open University of the United Kingdom, with multiple studies on Afghanistan, one of the biggest surprises in these last five years has been “the complex transition from a jihadist insurgency to a governing regime with a monopoly on state power.” Despite the lack of international recognition, the movement achieved extensive local control.
According to Bjelica, the biggest change the country experienced in five years is the stabilization and consolidation of the Taliban in government. In exchange for the disappearance of political parties, women’s rights, and the freedoms of society in general, the system achieved relative internal peace.
According to Hashimi, part of society has normalized the situation: “They have accepted that our daughters will no longer go to school, that we will have no choice but to keep them at home.” She even adds that some say “security is good, you can visit different parts of the country.”
“But I think we should ask those people a question. ‘If you see that security is good, who was making the country unsafe during the last 20 years?’ Of course, it was the Taliban. And now that they are in charge, who will plant bombs? Who will kill people?” Hashimi concludes.
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