“I cried for two days straight when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban,” says Pashtana Durrani, an Afghan feminist, activist and campaigner for women’s and girls’ education.. “There are two times I’ve been through hell. The first was when my father passed away. The second was on August 15th, 2021.”
That was the day, exactly three years ago, that the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. Just over a month later, on September 17th, they banned girls from attending secondary schools. The following year, on December 24th, they imposed a ban on women working in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), further restricting their participation in public life.
Despite the dire circumstances, Durrani and her team have persevered, continuing their underground school for women in Kandahar, evading Taliban detection. “We continue our school in Kandahar in hiding; eight times we have changed the place and times of the school,” Durrani says.
In 2018, Durrani founded Learn Afghanistan, an NGO dedicated to providing education to Afghan children and women. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, Learn was operating 18 digital schools in the south of the country.
“When people learned that we had a school in Kandahar, communities from Helmand, Jalalabad and Herat asked for similar schools in their areas,” Durrani says. “We went there and opened schools.” In Helmand, one school operates underground three days a week.
In the 1990s, the Durrani family fled Afghanistan to escape the civil war there and the Taliban’s control. Durrani was born in 1997 in a refugee camp in Pakistan, where she lived until 2016 when the family returned to Afghanistan. “When we returned ... we were in an internally displaced camp in Spin Boldak [in Kandahar province]. There was no government, and no one built schools for us.”
Durrani’s family is from Kandahar, a province known for being the home of many Taliban officials.
“My cousin Dordana wanted to go to school, but there was no school,” Durrani recalls. “Dordana told me to go and ask officials to build a school for us. I did, and I requested the officials [of the then US-backed Afghan government], but they mocked us. They said, ‘See the Kandaharian and education, you people support the Taliban, and you want education, you can’t learn.’ That’s when I decided to found Learn Afghanistan.”
Durrani was forced to leave Afghanistan once again after the Taliban returned to power in 2021, having been warned she was not safe there.
But her determination led her back to Afghanistan in July 2023, after 18 months of Taliban rule. Visiting one of Learn’s schools in Helmand, she found that “all of the students and all of the teachers knew me even though we had never met”.
Durrani recalls one young girl’s question: “I’m in Grade 7 now but I’m going to need support until Grade 12. Are you going to stay here until Grade 12?” Girls beyond the sixth grade, typically aged 12-13, are banned from attending school by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Once they complete sixth grade, they are required to leave school.
“The worst thing I have seen was when, in March, the girls went to school and were turned away,” Durrani says. The Afghan academic year generally begins in March, following the Nowruz (Persian new year) celebrations, which mark the start of spring. This schedule is aligned with the country’s climate and cultural practices.
Overall, Durrani’s return trip to Afghanistan painted a grim picture. “Life for women in Afghanistan is dire. Women at the Chaman border [between Afghanistan and Pakistan] are in a very bad situation. Women are afraid for their children and families,” she says. “The women that we work with have told me they are being subjected to sexual demands.”
Durrani’s strategy for keeping Learn’s schools operational under Taliban rule involves deep community engagement. “One of the first things we do is ask the [community] elders if they are willing and supportive of their daughters to attend or teach in this space,” she says. “We might be providing education, but we don’t have as much to lose. They give us the spaces, and they introduce the women as teachers, and they drop their daughters at the schools. But they protect their daughters. They protect the teachers. They protect the spaces.”
Despite the constant threat, Durrani remains steadfast. “I have to be smart about it. The best resistance is for them to see a woman or a girl reading right under their noses. That’s only possible if we do our work silently.”
Durrani’s message to the world is clear: “The one thing people should know about Afghans is that we are a country of rebels. And we will keep rebelling against the Taliban and anyone who enforces their outdated mentality again, and again, and again, until they lose power – which they will.”
She urges global action, calling on people to speak out and support activists on the ground. “Call your political representatives and ask them: what have you done about the current education ban for women and girls in Afghanistan? Speak out against the ban and keep sharing and supporting the work of activists who are working in this harsh reality.”
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