"To be honest, I feel like I'm living a nightmare. It's hard to comprehend what we've been through in the last two years," Maryam Marof Arwin, 29, told over the phone. 

Arwin, who lives in Kabul, founded an NGO called Afghanistan Women and Children Strengthen Welfare Organization, but it was seized by the Taliban two years ago — on August 15, 2021 — as they captured the Afghan capital and ousted the government of then-President Ashraf Ghani.

Despite initial promises to respect women's rights under Sharia, or Islamic law, the Taliban have since imposed draconian restrictions on women and girls. Most of them are  barred from participating in public life, educational institutions and the labor market, reports DW. 

Warnings even before the Taliban takeover

"I don't really understand where the hope came from that the Taliban had changed or even become better," said Arwin. "We always knew that with the Taliban in power, we would lose everything we had achieved.

"Twenty days before they came to power, we, women activists and civil society representatives in Kabul, organized a press conference to once again make the world community aware of our situation," she pointed out.

"We said, 'Look at the areas that were already controlled by the Taliban at that time and see how they despise women's rights.' But no one would listen to us."

Even before they seized Kabul, the Taliban had gradually been gaining control of large parts of rural Afghanistan. In the areas under their control, women and girls were confined to their homes and traditional gender roles as daughter, wife or mother — not unlike what life was like under their previous rule, from 1996 to 2001. At the time, Afghan women and girls were not allowed to study or work, and only allowed to leave their home when accompanied by male relatives.

Women were often publicly flogged or executed if they violated Taliban rules.

The Taliban of today aren't very different from the Taliban of the 1990s, Alema Alema, former Afghan deputy minister for peace, told DW. 

Before the Taliban took over, the Ministry for Peace was responsible for intra-Afghan peace negotiations. It was dissolved after the group seized power.

The Taliban have merely been more cautious — and more experienced — this time around than during their first stint in power, said Alema. 

"Since their takeover, they've issued 51 bans affecting women, which is more than one ban per month," she said.

"They didn't announce everything at once because they didn't want to scare the world community. In Afghanistan, too, they had to act cautiously at first so as not to antagonize society, before they consolidated their power."

Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque