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Lyse Doucet on Kabul today: ‘Fewer women are venturing out, but they haven’t completely disappeared’

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telegraph.co.uk

swept into Kabul on 15 August 2021, as US-led forces ended a 20-year-long engagement.There is an effective ban on girls’ secondary education; growing pressure on women working in ministries and government offices; and a tightening web of edicts restricting women’s lives.

But women are pushing back in whatever ways they can. ‘We aren’t as weak as we were 20 years [ago],’ insists Amina Ahmadi, ex-general director of the Afghanistan Revenue Department at the Ministry of Finance, nodding to the first repressive Taliban rule of the 1990s when women were denied education and opportunities to work.

Although Ahmadi has now left the country, she is helping to mobilise dozens of educated women at the ministry who have been told to stay home and give their jobs to male relatives.Ask them about hope, however, and they have very little. ‘I don’t believe in hope but I believe in our right to work,’ says Ahmadi.Over the past two decades, the country has produced women politicians, ambassadors and advisors, and a generation of schoolgirls who dared to dream bigger than ever.

Now its public face is exclusively male, bearded, and Taliban.This month’s revelation that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had been killed in a US strike on the balcony of a villa in Kabul, streets from the British embassy, underlines the Taliban’s conundrum in trying to move from guns to government.

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