AS Nargis approached Kabul aboard a rickety UN aircraft, she cried at the sight of Afghanistan’s capital far below. Nestled in a valley beneath snow-capped mountains, Kabul’s winding roads and buildings looked the same as when she’d left the then democratically run country five short months ago. But down on the ground, everything had changed. 

As the director of an international NGO and women’s rights activist, Nargis — not her real name — knew the risks of returning to the now Taliban-controlled country. 

By chance, the Afghan national was abroad when Kabul fell to the fundamentalist group on August 15 last year. Watching her country’s fragile democracy collapse from afar was a painful process, but, despite this, she tells me: “I didn’t think for a second that this would mean I wouldn’t come home again.” 

And so she began planning her return, against the wishes of her international colleagues, eventually arriving in Kabul on a cold day in December after a long, sleepless and emotional journey. 

“When I decided to come back, I really decided to come back to die in this country, to struggle,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Kabul, where temperatures have plummeted close to zero. 

Nargis is among the broad spectrum of women who remained (or in her case returned) to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after many fled, fearing a return to the group’s brutal rule in the late 1990s. 

Despite assurances women’s rights within Islamic law would be protected including access to work and study, in the months since the Taliban took over Kabul, women and girls have seen their rights drastically rolled back. 

Girls above the age of 12 have been banned from going to school in all but a few provinces, while the vast majority of women have been forced out of work, either by outright bans or fear. 

But many women in Afghanistan are still going to work, including in influential roles such as Nargis’s. At a recent online meeting held by women’s rights group FiLiA, Afghan women who chose to stay in the country spoke about the deterioration of women’s rights under the fundamentalist group but also their hopes that they can reverse this trend.

The meeting, chaired by Nargis, was aimed at raising the voices of women who have been overlooked in the discussion on women’s rights in Afghanistan.

“Inside the country there are women resisting every day, continuing to go to work, wear the dress they want, staying in restaurants, they are hearing music,” Nazanin, a women’s rights activist who runs a humanitarian NGO, told the meeting.

“It’s a kind of fight, it’s a kind of advocacy they are doing because a big percentage of women do not agree with the rules of the Taliban.

“This kind of work at the ground level can bring a great change to the work of the Taliban.”

Nazanin has continued to run her NGO, despite Taliban attempts to close down her office.

When this happened, she decided to meet the leadership to demand her office be reopened. She argued that without the work of her NGO, people would be deprived of much-needed aid. Her bid was successful and her office was reopened. 

Women in other parts of the country have also been able to claw back some freedoms by sitting with the Taliban leadership.

After the group closed down women’s cultural centres in Herat, a major city in western Afghanistan, social and cultural activist Faiza met the cultural director to urge him to restore the permits so they could be reopened.

Again, they agreed. Faiza has been leading advocacy efforts between women and the Taliban in Herat, and argues that those who choose to talk to the Taliban should be supported.

“They are the ones who are negotiating change that results in women continuing their work and their activities,” she says.

“We should not only be expecting to oppose, we should also be supported as we go ahead and try to bring about change in the way the Taliban are acting.”

This approach divides opinion among Afghan women, with some activists believing that by engaging with the Taliban, they are accepting their rule.

Speaking to me after the meeting, Nargis says this has created a split in the women’s movement, with those who stayed in the country or are engaging with the fundamentalist group accused of being pro-Taliban. 

Explaining how she’s lost family to both the Taliban and the former US-backed Afghan government, Nargis stresses: “I really believe in talking to the Taliban and not continuing this cycle of hate.

“And I believe as a woman you can do that by having a very, very multifaceted very dynamic women’s movement, where women who go and sit with the Taliban are trusted as the spokespeople, acting for the good of women as much as the women who go on the street protesting and they are connected.

“At least we shouldn’t be so fragmented that if you talk to the Taliban it is automatically interpreted as a pro-Taliban woman.”

While the women have been able to negotiate the return of some freedoms, this is not an option in many provinces where regional Taliban members have imposed harsher restrictions.

For example, under official Taliban rules women can walk freely without a mahram (a close male relative) on journeys under 47 miles.

But this often doesn’t translate down to the foot soldiers in rural provinces where women have been told that they will be shot at if they are seen outside without a mahram or fail to wear a full covering. 

While the Taliban have imposed sweeping restrictions on the rights of women, the group is not the only threat Afghan women are currently facing.

A knock-on effect of the Taliban takeover has been a sharp rise in gender-based violence, Faiza explains.

When democracy fell, so too did the women’s refuges and courts allowing victims to escape abuse and hold perpetrators to account.

Now women who wish to flee their families can only turn to informal justice systems — all-male elder-controlled committees — that are overwhelmingly biased in favour of the abusers. Women in this situation face overwhelming feelings of “hopelessness, depression and anxiety,” Faiza says.

Local reports in Herat recently identified 17 cases of women running away from home over the space of two weeks, and 700 cases of suicides and attempted suicides in the last few months.

“These are indicators of growing violence against women inside the home,” she told the meeting. 

This is also linked, Faiza says, to the spiralling rates of poverty in Afghanistan caused by the near total collapse of the country’s economy following the Taliban takeover and ensuing international sanctions, including the freezing of more than $9 billion in Afghan assets. 

The UN warned this week that Afghanistan is now “hanging by a thread” as millions of impoverished citizens struggle to survive. Those worst affected by the humanitarian crisis are women and girls.

“So it’s not just the Taliban but it’s also the other social problems that are coming up that are affecting women disproportionately and need to be paid attention to right now,” Faiza stresses. 

For now, Nargis feels relatively safe going about her day-to-day life. Every day she is driven to her office in Kabul where she leads an all-male team of colleagues (all her female staff left during the Kabul airlift, except the chef and cleaner).

She notes that this would have been unheard of during the first Taliban rule.

“Last time they were here you couldn’t imagine a youngish woman, living here on her own, at an international NGO with all male colleagues working on women’s rights, peace and youth projects.” 

But still, she remains cautious. The Taliban has been targeting more vocal women’s rights activists. In recent weeks two young women were reportedly abducted from their home in Kabul by Taliban soldiers after joining protests in the city. 

The demonstrations have been met with heavy force, with women subjected to beatings and pepper spray. 

Like all women in the country, Nargis’s freedoms to move around as she wishes have been seriously curtailed. She gets stopped by the Taliban as she’s driven around Kabul, and must go through a checkpoint outside her office every day.

“I’ve had to form a protective layer around myself,” she says, explaining how she’s set up a security system, informing neighbours every time she leaves or enters her building.

“If I’m not back in 12 hours, go check the house, if you don’t see me then contact this, this and this person.”

Nargis tries to get through each day by focusing on the positive moments. “When you live in a really shitty situation, little things become very powerful, very colourful.” 

These difficulties are compounded by her feelings of isolation. When she returned to Kabul she found her friends had all left the country.

Nargis estimates around 90 per cent of women activists in Kabul have fled. Her decision to return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was not one she took lightly.

But with her children and family living outside the country, she felt able to return in the knowledge that she would be the only one harmed by her decision.

“I’m just one person making a decision for myself, and a lot of people don’t have that privilege,” she tells me. “They have to make a decision for their families. If I had a 15-year-old daughter, or if I didn’t have a foreign passport or money I probably would have gone away on any flight that would take me.” 

Pushing her towards the country was the need to continue the decades-long struggle for women’s rights inside Afghanistan, as she did the last time the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996.

As a 14-year-old, Nargis rebelled against the group’s ban on girl’s education by secretly teaching children subjects in the basement of her neighbour’s home.

For now, Nargis believes the struggle for women’s rights has to take place under Taliban rule.

“Maybe I’ll change my mind next year but from where I’m sitting now — we do not have any political or military alternative to the Taliban,” she says. “But the harm of the fighting against the Taliban would be immense.”

With the Taliban exercising a degree of leniency in its approach to women’s rights, as Nazanin and Faiza’s cases show, Nargis stresses that women do have the power to evoke change, not just on the streets but at the negotiation table.

“While they are still transforming from a military insurgency into a government structure … this is a good time to highlight their positive deviance and to discourage their negative norm and try to get them to lean towards a liberal interpretation of religion,” she says. 

“But at best they could be a theocracy like Iran. So as long as they’re there we’ll always have to struggle against the version of religion that they want to impose on us.

“I think that’s the key. We have to prepare ourselves for a struggle of a lifetime and we are at the very beginning of it — if we give up now that’s just ridiculous.”

The names of the women in this article have been changed to protect their identities. 

Bethany Rielly is a news reporter at the Morning Star. You can follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/b_rielly.