As 2026 begins, it has been over 1,500 days since the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s brutal regime returned to power. In that time, the Taliban has not moderated its rule, reversed draconian policies, or softened its grip on power. Instead, the passage of time has been marked by the steady expansion of laws and restrictions that have systematically erased women and girls from nearly every aspect of public life. What has been framed as temporary by some has hardened into a system of governance built on exclusion, terror, and control.
Today, Afghan women live under a system of gender apartheid, a system of institutionalized discrimination that dictates where women may go, whether they may speak, work, learn, or receive medical care, and whether they may appear in public at all. More than 150 edicts issued by the Taliban, some of which go unreported, now govern daily life for women and girls, restricting every aspect of life, from education and employment to movement, dress, and even the sound of a woman’s voice.
In August 2024, the Taliban formalized many of these restrictions through a sweeping law to “promote virtue and eliminate vice,” codifying rules that treat women’s presence itself as a violation. Under this law, women are required to veil fully in public, including covering their faces, and are prohibited from singing, reading aloud, or speaking in ways deemed audible outside the home. The law further declares a woman’s voice to be “intimate,” reinforcing the notion that women must remain unseen and unheard.
The consequences of these policies extend far beyond symbolism. In December 2024, the Taliban issued a directive banning women and girls from attending public and private medical institutes, effectively cutting off the pipeline of future nurses and midwives in a country already facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The ban would prevent tens of thousands of women from entering the healthcare workforce, increasing the risks of maternal and neonatal deaths in a system where women are often prohibited from being treated by male doctors. Reports have already begun to emerge of women and girls dying due to lack of access to medical care, a reality expected to worsen as these policies take hold.
At the same time, the Taliban has moved to further isolate women from economic and civic life. Organizations that ordinarily employ women have been threatened with license revocations, and NGOs have been forced to shut down operations that once provided essential services. Women working for the United Nations have been barred from entering UN compounds, a move described by human rights experts as a direct breach of the UN Charter’s principles of equality and non-discrimination. Cuts to humanitarian and civil society funding have compounded these harms, stripping away what UN officials have described as the last remaining lines of protection for women and girls living under Taliban rule.
These restrictions are enforced not only through law but through fear. UN monitors have also documented a rise in corporal punishment, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and attacks against former officials despite Taliban claims of amnesty. Media freedom has continued to shrink, civil society has been systematically dismantled, and ethnic and religious minorities face discrimination and forced evictions. For women, this climate of repression is inescapable, shaping every aspect of daily survival.
Yet even as the Taliban deepens its system of control, international engagement with the terrorist regime has continued, raising alarm among human rights advocates. UN experts have repeatedly warned that normalizing relations with the Taliban risks legitimizing a system that is actively persecuting half the population. As Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett cautioned before the General Assembly, Afghanistan’s human rights situation continues to deteriorate with few grounds for optimism, and turning away now would undermine the foundations of the international human rights system itself.
Despite these realities, Afghan women have not disappeared. Many continue to resist through underground education networks, independent journalism, and global advocacy efforts calling for accountability and justice. Afghan women-led organizations have pushed the international community to formally recognize gender apartheid as a crime under international law, arguing that what is happening in Afghanistan is not cultural or religious, but systemic persecution.
In recent months, accountability efforts have taken a slightly more concrete shape. In September, the UN Human Rights Council voted to establish an independent investigative mechanism for Afghanistan with a mandate to collect, preserve, and analyze evidence of the most serious international crimes committed under Taliban rule, with particular attention to the regime’s system of discrimination, segregation, and exclusion targeting women and girls. The mechanism is designed to prepare case files for future prosecutions before the International Criminal Court or national courts exercising universal jurisdiction, filling a long-standing gap between documentation and criminal accountability. This development has been welcomed by Afghan women’s rights defenders and international jurists as a critical step toward ensuring that crimes against women are not buried with time or political fatigue.
In a landmark judgment this year, the People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan concluded that the Taliban’s rule constitutes a crime against Afghan women, documenting patterns of persecution that amount to gender apartheid under international law. While the tribunal carries no enforcement power, its findings have contributed to the growing global consensus that what is unfolding in Afghanistan is not a series of isolated abuses but a systematic regime of oppression that demands recognition, accountability, and action.
As the new year begins, the facts are no longer in dispute, and the issue remains clearer than ever. Afghan women and girls are living under a regime that has continuously and methodically stripped them of education, healthcare, work, movement, and public existence, which are some of the most basic tenets of life. Each new edict and ruling that confirms what we already know to be true, which is that the Taliban is getting away with a structure that they have built to erase women from society entirely. Time has not softened this reality; it has only entrenched it further.
Afghan women and girls have not stopped fighting and dreaming of a better life every day. Despite fear and never ending challenges, they continue to learn in secret, speak in whispers, document their own persecution, and imagine the futures they have always dreamed of but are systematically denied of pursuing. Their resistance has not faded, but it exists within a cage built by law, fear, and international inaction. They are trapped not due to a lack of courage or stamina, but because they have exhausted their options while the Taliban are consistently able to operate through terror without consequence. Now is not the time for the world to look away, but rather time to stoke the fire and end this vicious cycle where the Taliban are getting away with a regime of fear and persecution. We must keep the fire burning for them.
