THESE past weeks have seen me use any spare time I have to help pull together the definitive archive of my work as a photojournalist. By far the largest part of that archive is devoted to the country that I covered from as far back as the earliest days of the Soviet invasion in 1979. I’m talking of course about Afghanistan. 

Going through the thousands of pictures in the archive, many shot on film in pre-digital times, has been something of a strange and unsettling journey back through those decades. 

Like the images of Afghan mujahideen guerrilla fighters on the “jihad trail” high in the Hindu Kush mountains, all are moments in time captured as Afghans fought first the Soviets then after the Russians withdrew, battled each other for control of the country in the mid-1990s before the eventual rise of the Taliban and what would morph into the 20-year long US-led multinational war against the Islamists.

It will be three years ago today on August 15, 2021, that the Taliban took power in the country. Most of us doubtless still remember those dramatic scenes on our television news bulletins as the world scrambled to airlift its nationals and vulnerable Afghans from the country.

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To this day that debacle stands as one of the most disgraceful abandonments of a people to an uncertain fate witnessed in modern times. 

For weeks Afghanistan was never out of the headlines. Today, it is almost never in them, despite the fact that unimaginable suffering inside the country continues at the hands of its Taliban rulers. No-one during those intervening years has suffered more than Afghanistan’s women and children. 

Today, August 15, has been declared a national holiday to commemorate the Taliban government’s takeover back in 2021. But for Afghan women there is little cause for celebration.

According to the UN, Afghanistan has become the most repressive country in the world for women and girls who are deprived of virtually all their basic rights.

Speaking at the international body’s Security Council last year an Afghan women’s rights campaigner, Zubaida Akbar, detailed how since the Taliban seized power “the rights of Afghan women and girls have been decimated through over 40 decrees”.

“The Taliban have sought not only to erase women from public life, but to extinguish our basic humanity,” said Zubaida, who was speaking on behalf of the human rights group Freedom Now, which deals with 20 mostly women-led grassroots movements inside Afghanistan. 

“There is one term that appropriately describes the situation of Afghan women today – gender apartheid,” Zubaida added.

Under Taliban rule girls over 12 have been excluded from education. The group has also violated women’s right to freedom of movement without a male guardian, banned them from many forms of employment, closed all beauty salons at a cost of 60,000 women’s jobs, dismantled protections for women and girls experiencing gender-based violence, created barriers to them accessing health care, and barred them from playing sports and even visiting parks.  

Numerous recent reports point to scores of women and girls being arbitrarily detained and subjected to ill-treatment since early January for allegedly violating the Taliban’s dress code for women.

According to the UN, women and girls were forcibly taken into police vehicles and accused of wearing a “bad hijab”, and held incommunicado, with the Taliban reportedly claiming that they were wearing colourful and tight clothing against their instructions. 

As far back as May 2022 less than a year after taking power, the Taliban ordered all women to observe “proper hijab”, preferably by wearing a chadari (a loose black garment covering the body and face) in public and made male relatives responsible for enforcing the ban or face punishment.

Women and girls were reportedly held in overcrowded spaces in police stations, received only one meal a day, with some of them being subjected to physical violence, threats and intimidation,” UN experts said. Legal representation and access to justice or reparation were also not made available to them.

On every conceivable level women face oppression. Though women’s participation in the workforce in Afghanistan has always been limited by conservative cultural beliefs, today under the Taliban barely 200,000 Afghan women have the Taliban’s “permission” to work. 

Before entering Kabul back in 2021 and installing their Islamic Emirate government – that today remains unrecognised by every other country – some 14.8% of women were in the workforce. Last year according to World Bank data this was down to a staggering 4.8% in 2023. 

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This led Roza Otunbayeva, head of the US political mission in Afghanistan, to observe that while the country needed to recover from decades of war, most of its potential workforce were “shut away in their homes, their dreams crushed and their talents confiscated.” 

So what then needs to be done to help Afghan women? Well, some of the potential measures were outlined last year by Heather Barr, associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, who notes that “in a world of overwhelmingly male leaders, almost no politician is ready to expend real political capital to back women and girls,” in Afghanistan.

Barr says what they should be doing – among many things – is “create a new accountability mechanism for Afghanistan, with the capacity and mandate to collect and preserve evidence of all international crimes committed there … including a strong focus on crimes against women and girls.” 

Humanitarian donors too said Barr should boost aid, particularly through nongovernmental organisations helping fund women-led Afghan aid organisations, Afghan organisations working to uphold human rights, and projects bringing remote education and employment opportunities to Afghan girls and women. There are many other measures that could be taken too.

Far from Afghanistan in a world apart at last week’s Paris Olympics, the young Afghan woman sprinter 28-year-old Kimia Yousofi, was part of the six-person Afghan team competing that comprised of three men and three women, selected by the Afghanistan Olympic Committee which operates outside the country. 

Yousofi herself fled to Iran when the Taliban took control in 2021. At the end of her 100m heat during which she finished two seconds behind the winner she held up words scribbled on a piece of paper that read “Education” written in black. “Sport” underneath it in green and in red, the third colour of Afghanistan’s flag, the words “Our rights”. 

It was an inspiring moment and a single reminder to the world that the plight of Afghan women should not be forgotten. Yousofi’s cry for action needs to be heard and the world like never before needs to double down on efforts to tackle the massive injustice that prevails under the Taliban.