She was told to marry into a country that prohibits girls’ education. So she got in a taxi and ran away

Alia – whose name we have changed for her safety – traveled hundreds of kilometers from her village to Kabul to escape marriage.

Last year, the taxi trip with her cousin – covered from head to toe, only the eyes visible, as prescribed by the regulations – was an exceptional and risky thing in Afghanistan, where at any time they could be stopped by Taliban inspectors who applied the rules prohibiting women from traveling long distances without being accompanied by a male relative.

But Alia, 19, and her cousin were not stopped at any Taliban checkpoints and managed to reach the capital.

“I made up an excuse to my family that I was coming here to meet my friends and former classmates. But that’s not true. They are not here. The real reason is that if I stayed in Daykundi, I would have to get married.”

Instead, she arrived in Kabul with a plan: she signed up for an English course.

These short, narrowly focused private classes – accessible only to those who can afford them – are, along with madrassas that focus on religious education, the only options for girls to learn after primary school in Afghanistan. But neither is close to replacing formal schooling.

It has now been almost five years since the Taliban prevented girls over the age of 12 from going to school, with various reasons given for why the ban remains in place.

Years in which girls like Alia grew up without the education they wanted and needed. Years in which the path to a career was effectively closed, narrowing their options until millions of girls in Afghanistan were left with only one choice: marriage.

These boys attend a madrasa, or religious school. Some religious education is accessible to girls

Alia’s story is unusual, not just because of her courage. But she also comes from a family that has the financial means to exploit the few opportunities available to young women – a rarity in a country where three out of four people cannot meet their basic needs, according to the United Nations.

It’s not that Alia’s family doesn’t want her to study – they accepted that she wanted to stay in Kabul and still finance her English lessons today – but even they are constrained by the realities of life in Afghanistan.

“Before the ban, my parents passionately encouraged me to go to school. They told me that one could certainly achieve one’s dream of becoming a pilot.

“But now they say the best way for me is to get married because I can’t go to school, university, and I can’t even work.”

Alia has received marriage proposals. She is afraid of having to accept one, afraid that the family she is marrying into will not give her the freedom that her parents have. “Some families can be very restrictive. They might tell me to forget my dreams. I’m not positive about that at all.”

But his determination is unwavering. “If my family doesn’t force me to get married, I will wait. I will resist it until my last breath.”

But resisting is difficult.

In a small, bare house west of Kabul, we meet Shama.

“If the Taliban had not taken power, I would have almost finished my studies. I would be close to my dream of becoming a doctor. That’s what I wanted,” Shama explains.

Instead, four years ago, when she was 18, her mother pushed her to get married. Today, she is the mother of a baby and a toddler, two girls.

We have changed the names of her and her family for their safety.

The BBC is protecting the identities of all women who contributed to this article

Her mother Kamila – who worked as a cleaner to send her daughters to school after the death of her husband six years ago – felt she had no choice. She feared that her daughter – a young woman of marriageable age – would attract negative attention and face difficulties if she remained single.

“I was afraid that they [foot soldiers of the Taliban government] I will ask myself why I don’t marry her,” Kamila tells us.

“I wanted her to be educated, to work and to contribute to society. I am illiterate so I am like a blind person. But I wanted my daughters to learn. She [Shama] I had so many dreams. But that didn’t happen to him.”

The Taliban government’s education ban has already had an irreversible impact on the lives of countless women and girls. According to the United Nations, if the ban continues until 2030, “more than two million girls will have been deprived of education beyond primary school in a country that already has one of the lowest female literacy rates in the world.”

“Having a husband is not a woman’s only dream. She must first stand on her own two feet, become independent, then get married and start a family. But I entered this new life without any of that. My dreams remain unfulfilled,” says Shama.

Before the Taliban takeover, Shama had refused many marriage proposals.

“I turned them down because my education was more important to me than anything. What I wanted for myself was not what they wanted. [prospective husbands] wanted for me,” she said.

Today, she says she is constantly stressed, even when watching films in which female characters are depicted working or studying.

She is treated well by her husband, but the sorrow of not having had the chance to realize her potential never leaves her. “It’s really difficult for me. I feel like I’m locked in my house. I only live for my children,” she says.

Her sister Nora, 18, now fears that she too will suffer the same fate.

“I’m too young to get married. I want to continue my studies. It’s like being in prison. I’m afraid to go out because of the government and at home, my mother tells me I have to get married,” says Nora, who often dreams of going back to school.

But she doesn’t believe she will ever return to school under a Taliban government.

“The Taliban government said schools were closed to girls until further notice. But it’s been four and a half years now. We wait for this message every day.”

Since 2021, the Taliban government’s response to the question of when school will reopen for girls has oscillated from one reason to another, now landing on deflection and silence.

In September 2021, during our first interview with a Taliban spokesperson after their takeover, the spokesperson said that girls’ schools would open, adding that they were “working to improve the security situation.”

A year later, the response was that “religious scholars have problems with the safety of girls traveling to and from school,” but they were working on the problem.

In 2024, the Taliban government’s deputy spokesperson, Hamdullah Fitrat, told me: “We are waiting for the leadership’s decision.”

This month I met Fitrat again, who did not want to be photographed with a woman or sit across from me. I asked them how they could continue to justify the ban on secondary and university education for women.

He responded by pointing out that “around seven million boys and five million girls are currently studying.”

“Restriction of education beyond sixth grade is a separate issue,” he said, pointing us to the Department of Education who “hopefully… will provide a satisfactory response.”

When I pressed further, saying that women and girls in Afghanistan had told us they did not believe education would ever open under the watch of the Taliban government, his response was once again to ask the Ministry of Education.

We asked the same question of the Ministry of Education. They didn’t respond.

There are divisions within the Taliban government on the issue of women’s education that are obvious to us, but the supreme leader has only hardened his stance over the years.

Women and girls remember as clearly as yesterday the day schools closed for them.

“All I did was cry and sob all day and night,” Alia recalled. “I couldn’t sleep for a week. I felt like I was walking around like a corpse.”

“When I see men my age who have graduated and are going to university, I feel terrible, I feel like I’m burning in hell,” she adds.

Women face a host of other restrictions imposed by the Taliban’s supreme leader, vigorously enforced in some places, with little more freedom in others.

But the diktats create fear among people. The collective impact of government measures, and in some cases self-imposed restrictions, is that women are virtually absent from public life.

Defending his government, Fitrat said: “We have issued thousands of permits to women to run businesses, which is a positive step.”

He also claimed that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – the Taliban government’s morality police – resolved more than “2,000 cases in which women were denied their rightful share of inheritance” and that “2,500 women who were forced into marriage or were minors were assisted.”

But last week, the Taliban government wrote into law rules that imply legal approval of child marriage and in which the silence of an underage girl can be interpreted as consent to marriage.

And evidence on the ground suggests the opposite: the prevalence of early and forced marriage is increasing because girls are barred from studying.

Among the women and girls we spoke with, there is a sense that one of the most serious forms of institutionalized discrimination no longer sparks as much shock or outrage. They feel abandoned by the world.

“If we hadn’t been forgotten, something would surely have been done by now,” says Alia.

“I often ask myself: why were we born in Afghanistan?” Nora said.

Her mother Kamila has a message for mothers everywhere.

“In a world where your daughters are allowed to study and work, let them do it. Let them become independent.

“Here in Afghanistan, it’s over for us.”

Additional reporting by Imogen Anderson, Mahfouz Zubaide and Sanjay Ganguly

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