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Alia, whose name has been changed for her safety, traveled hundreds of kilometers from her village to Kabul to escape the marriage.<\/p>\n
Riding in a taxi last year with her female cousin, covered from head to toe, with only their eyes visible, as required by the rules, was something extraordinary and dangerous in Afghanistan, where they could be stopped at any moment by Taliban inspectors enforcing the rules that prohibit them. women to travel long distances without an accompanying male relative.<\/p>\n
“I made up an excuse to my family that I was coming here to see friends and former classmates. But that’s not true. They’re not here. The real reason is that if I stayed in Daykundi, they’d force me to get married.”<\/p>\n
Instead, she arrived in Kabul with a plan: she enrolled in a language course English.<\/p>\n
These short-term private courses, available only to those who can afford them, along with madrassas that focus on religious education, are the only options for girls to learn after primary school in Afghanistan. But neither can replace formal education.<\/p>\n
It has been almost five years since the Taliban banned girls over the age of 12 from going to school, and various reasons have been given to explain why the ban still continues.<\/p>\n
Five years during which girls like Alia have grown up without the education they wanted and needed. Years in which the path to a career has been almost completely closed, narrowing their options, until millions of girls in Afghanistan are left with only one choice: marriage.<\/p>\n
Alia’s story is unusual, not only for her bravery. She also comes from a family that has the financial means to pursue the few opportunities that exist for young women, a rarity in a country where three out of four people cannot meet basic needs, according to the United Nations.<\/p>\n
It’s not that Alia’s family doesn’t want her to study, they’ve agreed for her to stay in Kabul and are still funding her English course, but they too are limited by the reality of life in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore the ban, “My parents passionately encouraged me to go to school. They told me that I could definitely achieve my dream of becoming a pilot. But now they say that the best way for me is to get married because I can’t go to school, university, or even work,” she explains.<\/p>\n
Alia has received marriage proposals. She is afraid that she may be forced to accept one of them, and she is afraid that the family she will marry into may not give her the freedom her parents give her.<\/p>\n
“Some families can be very restrictive. It is possible to tell me to forget my dreams. I don’t feel good about that at all.”<\/p>\n
“If my family does not force me to marry, I will wait. I will resist until my last breath,” she says. But resistance for a long time is difficult.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in a small, bare house west of Kabul, we meet Shama.<\/p>\n
“If the Taliban hadn’t taken over, I would have almost finished school by now. I would be close to my dream of becoming a doctor. That’s what I wanted,” says Shama.<\/p>\n
Instead, four years ago, at the age At 18, she was pushed by her mother to marry.<\/p>\n
She is now the mother of a baby and a young child, both girls.<\/p>\n
Her and her family’s names have been changed for their safety.<\/p>\n
Her mother, Kamila, who worked as a cleaner to send the girls to school after her husband died six years ago, felt she had no choice. She was afraid that her daughter, a young woman of marriageable age, would attract negative attention and face difficulties if she remained single.<\/p>\n
“I was afraid that they (Taliban government soldiers) would ask me why I wasn’t marrying her,” says Kamila.<\/p>\n
“I wanted her to be educated, work and contribute to society. I’m illiterate, so I’m like a blind person. But I wanted her daughters “She (Shama) had so many dreams. But they didn’t come true,” she explains further. According to the United Nations, if the ban continues until 2030, “more than two million girls will be deprived of education beyond primary school, in a country that already has one of the lowest levels of literacy among women in the world”. without any of these. My dreams remained unrealized.<\/p>\n
Before the Taliban took over, Shama had rejected many marriage proposals.<\/p>\n
“I rejected them because education was more important to me than anything else. What I wanted for myself was not what they (potential men) wanted for me,” she says.<\/p>\n
Now she says she is constantly under stress and feels shocked even when she watches movies where female characters are shown working or studying.<\/p>\n
Her husband treats her well, but the pain of not having the chance to realize her potential never leaves her.<\/p>\n
“It’s really very hard for me. I feel like I’m a prisoner in my house. I live only for my children,” she says.<\/p>\n
Her 18-year-old sister, Nora, now fears she will face the same. luck.<\/p>\n
“I’m too young to get married. I want to continue my education. It’s like being in prison. I’m afraid to go out because of the government, while at home my mother tells me I have to get married,” says Nora, who often dreams of going back to school.<\/p>\n
But she doesn’t believe she’ll ever go back to school under the Taliban government.<\/p>\n
“The Taliban government has said schools are closed for girls until a another announcement. But it’s been four and a half years now. We’ve been waiting for that message every day,” she says.<\/p>\n
Since 2021, the Taliban government’s response to the question of when schools will reopen for girls has gone from one reason to another, ending now in evasion and silence.<\/p>\n
In September 2021, in the first interview with a Taliban spokesman after they took power, he said that schools for girls would open, adding that they were “working to improve the security situation”.<\/p>\n
A year later, the response was that “religious scholars have concerns about the safety of girls traveling to and from school”, but that they were working to resolve the problem.<\/p>\n
In 2024, another Taliban government official, Hamdullah Fitrat, said that “We are awaiting the decision of leadership’.<\/p>\n
This month, the BBC’s South East Asia and Afghanistan correspondent, Yogita Limaye, who interviewed many girls in Afghanistan about their desire for an education, met Fitrat again, who did not want to be photographed with or sit across from a woman. She had asked him how they could continue to justify banning secondary and university education for women.<\/p>\n
He had responded by pointing out that “about seven million boys and five million girls are currently studying”.<\/p>\n
“Limiting education beyond the sixth grade is a separate issue”, he said, directing the medium to the Ministry of Education.<\/p>\n
When Limaye had insisted further, saying that women and girls in Afghanistan said that don’t believe education will ever open up under the Taliban government, his response was again for the medium to go to the Ministry of Education.<\/p>\n
Well the Ministry of Education has not responded to the BBC’s questions.<\/p>\n
There is division within the Taliban government on the issue of women’s education, but the supreme leader has only hardened his stance over the years.<\/p>\n
Women and girls remember the day schools were closed to them as if it had happened yesterday.<\/p>\n
“All I did was cry and complain all day and night,” Alia recalls.<\/p>\n
“I couldn’t sleep for a week. I felt like I was walking around like a dead body. When I see men my age who have graduated and are going to university, I feel very bad, I feel like I’m burning in hell,” she adds.<\/p>\n
Women also face many other restrictions imposed by the supreme leader of the Taliban, strictly enforced in some countries, while elsewhere there is a little more freedom.
\nBut these orders instill fear in people. The collective impact of government enforcement and, in some cases, self-imposed restrictions has made women almost absent from public life.<\/p>\n
Defending his government, Fitrat says: “We have issued thousands of permits for women to run businesses, which is a positive step”. that “2,000 cases where women were denied their share of inheritance” and that “2,500 women who were being forced into marriage or were underage have been helped”.<\/p>\n
But last week, the Taliban government turned into law, rules that imply legal approval of child marriages and where the silence of a minor girl can be interpreted as consent to the marriage.
\nBut the evidence on the ground suggests the opposite: that the prevalence of forced and underage marriages is increasing because girls are forbidden to study.<\/p>\n
Among the women and girls the BBC spoke to, there is a feeling that one of the worst forms of institutionalized discrimination is no longer causing as much shock or anger. They feel abandoned by the world.<\/p>\n
“If we hadn’t been forgotten, then surely something would have been done by now,” says Alia.
\n“I often think: why were we born in Afghanistan?”, says Nora.<\/p>\n
However, her mother, Kamila, has a message for mothers around the world: In a world where your daughters are allowed to study and work, let them do it. Let them become independent!.<\/p>\n
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