She was told to marry in a country which bans girls’ education. So she got in a taxi and fled

Alia, whose name we have changed for her safety, traveled hundreds of kilometers from her village to Kabul to escape marriage.

Last year, traveling by taxi with a female cousin (she was covered from head to toe, with only her eyes visible, according to the rules) was exceptional and risky in Afghanistan, where they could be caught at any time by Taliban inspectors who enforce rules that ban women from traveling long distances without a male relative.

However, 19-year-old Alia and her cousin managed to reach the capital without being stopped at any Taliban checkpoints.

“I made an excuse by telling my family that I was coming here to meet my friends and former classmates. But that is not true. They are not here. The real reason is that if I stayed in Daykundi, I would be forced to get married.”

Instead, he came to Kabul with a plan: He enrolled in an English language course.

These short-term, narrowly focused private courses, available only to those who can afford them, are the only options for girls to study after primary school in Afghanistan, along with madrassas that focus on religious education. But neither comes close to replacing formal education.

It has been almost five years since the Taliban prevented girls over the age of 12 from attending school, and various reasons have been put forward to explain why the ban remains in effect.

Years when girls like Alia were deprived of the education they wanted and needed. Years when career paths were effectively closed, options were narrowed, and millions of girls in Afghanistan were faced with only one option: marriage.

Alia’s story is extraordinary not just because of her bravery. But she also comes from a family with enough money to take advantage of the few opportunities available to young women; This is a rare situation in a country where three out of four people cannot meet their basic needs, according to the United Nations.

It’s not that Alia’s parents don’t want her to study – they’ve accepted that she wants to stay in Kabul and are even now funding an English course – but even they are constrained by the realities of life in Afghanistan.

“Before the ban, my family passionately encouraged me to go to school. They said you could definitely achieve your dream of becoming a pilot.

“But now they say the best way for me is to get married because I can’t go to school, university, or even work.”

Alia receives marriage proposals. He is afraid that he may have to accept someone, that the family he marries into may not give him the freedom that his parents gave him. “Some families can be very restrictive. It is possible that they will tell me to forget my dreams. I do not think positively about this at all.”

But his determination is very firm. “If my family does not force me to marry, I will wait. I will resist until my last breath.”

But it’s hard to resist.

We meet Shama in a small, bare house in western Kabul.

“If the Taliban had not taken over, I would have almost finished school by now. I would be very close to my dream of becoming a doctor. This is what I wanted,” says Shama.

Instead, he was pushed into marriage by his mother four years ago, when he was 18. Now a mother of a baby and a toddler; They are both girls.

We changed their names for the safety of him and his family.

Her mother, Kamila, who worked as a cleaner to send her daughters to school after her husband died six years ago, thought she had no choice. She feared that her daughter, a young woman of marriageable age, would attract negative attention and face difficulties if she remained single.

“I was afraid of them [foot soldiers of the Taliban government] I will question why I didn’t get him married,” says Kamila.

“I wanted her to be educated, work and contribute to society. I am blind because I cannot read or write. But I wanted my daughters to learn. [Shama] He had many dreams. But it didn’t happen for him.”

The Taliban government’s ban on education has had an irreversible impact on the lives of countless women and girls. 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 where female literacy rates are already one of the lowest in the world.”

Shama says, “Having a husband is not the only dream of a woman. First, she needs to stand on her own feet, be independent, then get married and start a family. But I entered this new life without any of these. My dreams did not come true.”

Before the Taliban took over, Shama had turned down many marriage proposals.

“I rejected them because my education was more important to me. What I wanted for myself was not what they wanted. [prospective husbands] “He wanted it for me,” he says.

She says she now feels constantly stressed and triggered even when she watches movies depicting female characters working or studying.

Her husband treats her well, but the pain of not reaching her potential never leaves her. “It’s really hard for me. I feel like I’m trapped in my house. I live only for my children,” she says.

Her 18-year-old sister Nora now fears that she will face the same fate.

Nora, who often dreams of returning to school, said, “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, and at home my mother tells me I have to get married.” he says.

However, he does not believe he will be able to return to school during the Taliban government.

“The Taliban government said schools for girls were closed until further notice. But it has been four and a half years. We have been waiting for this message every day.”

The Taliban government’s response to the question of when schools will reopen for girls since 2021 has veered from one reason to another, now turning into deflection and silence.

In our first interview with the Taliban spokesman after taking power in September 2021, the spokesman said that schools for girls would be opened and that they were “working to improve the security situation.”

The response, a year later, was: “Religious scholars have issues with the safety of girls going to and from school,” but they were working on the problem.

In 2024, Hamdullah Fitrat, deputy spokesman of the Taliban government, told me: “We are waiting for the leadership’s decision.”

This month, I once again met Fitrat, who did not want to take a photo with a woman or sit across from me. I asked how they could continue to justify the ban on women’s secondary and university education.

He responded by stating that “about seven million boys and five million girls are currently being educated.”

“Imposing restrictions on education beyond the sixth grade is a separate issue,” he said, referring us to the education ministry, which “we hope will give a satisfactory answer.”

When I pressed further, saying that women and girls in Afghanistan had told us that they did not believe that education would be opened under the supervision of the Taliban government, her response was to ask the ministry of education once again.

We also asked the same question to the Ministry of National Education. They did not answer.

There are divisions within the Taliban government on women’s education that are clear to us, but the supreme leader has hardened his stance over the years.

Women and girls remember the day schools were closed for them as clearly as if it were yesterday.

“All I did all day and night was cry and sob,” Alia recalls. “I couldn’t sleep for a week. I felt like I was walking around like a corpse.”

“When I see men my age graduating and going to university, I feel so bad, I feel like I’m burning in hell,” he adds.

Women face a host of other restrictions imposed by the Taliban’s religious leader, which are enforced strongly in some places and with slightly more freedom in others.

However, dictatorships create fear in people. The collective effect of government sanctions and, in some cases, self-imposed restrictions is that women have virtually no participation in public life.

Defending his government, Fitrat says, “We have given thousands of permits to women to start businesses, this is a positive step.”

He also claimed that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the moral police of the Taliban government, had resolved “more than 2,000 cases in which women were denied their rightful share of inheritance” and “2,500 women forced into marriage or underage women were assisted.”

But last week, the Taliban government wrote rules requiring legal approval of child marriage and allowing an underage girl’s silence to be interpreted as consent to the marriage.

And the evidence on the ground shows the opposite; The prevalence of underage and forced marriages is increasing as girls are prevented from studying.

There is a sense among the women and girls we spoke to that one of the most severe forms of institutionalized discrimination no longer triggers as much shock or anger as it once did. They feel abandoned by the world.

“If we had not been forgotten, something would have been done by now,” says Alia.

“I often think: Why were we born in Afghanistan?” Nora says.

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 be independent.

“It’s all over for us here in Afghanistan.”

Additional reporting by Imogen Anderson, Mahfouz Zubaide and Sanjay Ganguly