The Taliban’s increasingly absurd bans that are setting Afghan women back a century

On Thursday, a Russian delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk arrived in Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders and discuss commercial investments, marking the highest-level visit to the Afghan capital in recent years: Russia is the only country to have officially recognised the Taliban government last year, and according to the press release issued, trade between Russia and Afghanistan more than doubled in the first eight months of 2026, reaching over 349 million dollars. The group’s leaders, seeking legitimacy and economic support, took the opportunity to state that “Afghanistan, thanks to its strategic location, rich resources and a vast workforce of 24 million people, has great potential for economic development and investment”. The two countries signed 15 memoranda of understanding worth $103 million, mainly concerning Russian exports of medicines to Afghanistan, which, 25 years after the start of the US invasion and five years after the return of the Taliban, is facing an extremely severe economic crisis – Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world – and that is not all.

Twenty-six years ago, in the summer of 2000, around three hundred Afghan women gathered in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to draft a charter of rights together: the ‘Declaration of the Fundamental Rights of Afghan Women’. These included: equality between men and women; personal safety and freedom from torture; physical and mental health for women and their children; equal protection under the law; education in all intellectual and physical disciplines; fair working conditions; freedom of movement; freedom of thought, speech, assembly and political participation; the right to participate in cultural life; and the right to wear or not to wear the burqa. Since seizing control of the country on 15 August 2021, the Taliban have introduced over two hundred laws and decrees that deny more than 2.6 million Afghan women access to secondary education and exclude women and girls from public life, setting Afghanistan back not by 26 years but by a century. A report by Human Rights Watch, published to mark the fifth anniversary of the return of Sharia law to Afghanistan, states that the Taliban government has imposed ‘draconian’ policies that have turned Afghanistan into one of the ‘world’s most serious human rights crises, particularly for women and girls’; and this week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said that the humanitarian situation in the country “is gradually and step by step getting worse, not only for girls and women, but for the entire community”.

According to the UN, now that the Taliban are celebrating the “long and arduous struggle, the jihad and the great sacrifices through which the Afghans have managed to liberate their country” – as stated by the government’s deputy spokesperson, Hamdullah Fitrat, on the 25th anniversary of the invasion – Afghanistan finds itself at a crossroads: restricting girls’ access to education represents “one of the most sensitive educational challenges in the world”, and a drastic increase in humanitarian needs is forecast for 2027. The Taliban have banned Afghan women from being examined by male doctors, have imposed the requirement for a mahram – a male relative – even to travel to hospitals, and at the same time have barred women from accessing medical training, dramatically reducing the number of female doctors, nurses and midwives in the country. These bans, which are constantly escalating, “are reaching new levels of absurdity,” wrote a group of Afghan journalists on Thursday in a report published in The Guardian and Zan Times, detailing the extent to which restrictions on women’s access to medical care in Afghanistan have gone. A new ban imposed by the Taliban security forces prevents male dentists from treating female patients; they face raids and warnings that they may be imprisoned should they be found in their surgeries. In Balkh province, officials have been forbidden from addressing female patients by their real names and have been ordered to use the word ‘Bibi’ (madam) to refer to them. Some doctors have hired staff to stand guard outside the clinics whilst they are treating a woman, a clinic assistant told journalists; they keep a chador in the surgery and occasionally joke about putting it on in case the Taliban should enter: “That way, they won’t realise I’m a man.”