Afghanistan Peace CampaignIt was a warm summer afternoon on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban entered Kabul and changed the lives of millions. Shallah*, then 16, watched the news at home on the Afghan TV channel Tolo news. She ran crying to the garden, to tell her mother that Afghanistan had fallen.
Her younger sister, Fatimah*, then 11, was at her cousin’s house, where her aunt told her the news. At the time, she says, she did not understand what a takeover meant, or who the Taliban were. Her elder sister, Maahi*, then 22, was well aware of the consequences and remembers her hands shaking at work as she read the news on her phone, on Facebook pages of Afghan news.
At that point the three sisters were living thousands of kilometres away in Qom, a city in central Iran, their family having left Afghanistan six years earlier because of the growing violence and a desire for the girls to grow up in peace. But the family had entered the country illegally and knew they could be arrested or deported at any time.
At first the older sisters tried to convince themselves that if the worst happened, maybe things would not be so bad for women and girls under the Taliban. Perhaps, they thought, these Taliban were different from the ones of the late 1990s, who had implemented a systematic denial of women’s rights that gave rise to the concept of gender apartheid. Twenty years had passed, and the Taliban was now making reassuring promises of women’s rights and girls’ education.
But inside Afghanistan, others were not so sure. Millions have fled to Pakistan and Iran over the past decade, with the numbers accelerating after the Taliban takeover. By the end of last year, there were an estimated 1.4 million undocumented Afghans living illegally in Iran, alongside a further 3 million living there with visas, residency permits or legal refugee status.
Mass deportations from both countries over the past year have seen more than 1 million people forced back to life under the Taliban, with about 400,000 Afghans deported from Iran since the start of the year.
The three sisters were born in Iran, but their parents brought them back to Afghanistan in about 2010 to allow Maahi and her brother to study. At the time, Iran did not allow undocumented Afghan children to remain in education past primary school.
Maahi remembers the strange feelings she had – a mix of happiness to come back home but fearful of leaving the only life she had known until then. At 11 years old, she did not yet understand the war between the US-led coalition and the Taliban.
By 2017, the ongoing war and attacks on civilians convinced her parents to leave again for Iran, to keep their children safe. Maahi was in her last year of high school, and wanted to study to become a journalist. She admired two Afghan journalists: Yama Siawash, who has since been assassinated, and Farahnaz Forotan, who now lives in exile.
The Iranian authorities had relaxed their policy regarding Afghan refugees’ access to schools and published an edict allowing them, even if undocumented, to study in Iran until the end of high school.
Maahi was overjoyed, until she realised that the authorities had put an age limit on this: she was 21 by then, as it had taken her two years to get the educational papers allowing her to study, but only Afghans below the age of 20 could study in Iranian schools. She was forced to start work to support her parents while her younger sisters went to school.
But studying for the first time at a school in Iran, Fatimah, the youngest sister, then five, says she was shocked by the treatment of Afghan children. “When we took our exams, Iranian students always got higher grades than Afghan students, and the principal would find any excuse to criticise the Afghans’ uniforms, never the Iranians’,” she says.
“Because we were undocumented, if we did something that the principal did not like, they threatened to expel us, saying they could drop us from school as they wished,” she says.
Shallah also joined an Iranian school and was a bright student, but this did not stop her from being insulted, including being called “afghani” – the name of the currency – instead of Afghan. She cried at the bus stop and hid the harassment from her parents.
She says she finished top of her class at the age of 12 and was meant to receive a prize. But when she stood up in front of the school and the official realised she was Afghan, the school principal said there had been a mistake, and instead gave the prize to the second-best student, an Iranian girl.
Shallah was among the last Afghan girls to benefit from the edict allowing Afghans to go to school. Fatimah was still in grade 8 (aged 14) when the edict expired in 2025. As she was about to start a new semester, she says the principal came to their class and informed them that only Iranians and documented Afghans would be allowed to register to continue.
The end of the edict last year coincided with a wave of anti-Afghan xenophobia and Iranian authorities’ accusations that Afghans had helped Israel in its attacks against the country.
The authorities intensified arrests and deportations and in May this year, their father was detained while at work. When Maahi and their mother went to look for him at the police station, they were arrested too, with the whole family later deported.
The sisters and their family have now settled in Herat, the city closest to the Iranian border in western Afghanistan. But any earlier hopes Maahi had for a more tolerant Taliban movement have long faded away. Women and girls have been barred from nearly every aspect of public life: schools, universities, most jobs and even parks.
The sisters say they now mostly stay at home, fearful of the Taliban “morality police” and its crackdown on what they deem inappropriate clothing. At least two people, including a boy, were killed by security forces in Herat province in June after protests over the arrests of women accused of violating dress code.
Despite the ban on schooling, the three girls do manage to attend unofficial private classes. The family are using their savings to pay the monthly fees of 2,500 afghani (£28) for the three sisters. It cannot award them diplomas, but the sisters say it keeps them focused on a future in which they might be able to resume their studies.
Maahi, the eldest sister, studies German, and says she hopes she can one day finish high school and emigrate there.
“I am not one to wait for what the future will bring me,” she says. “I am one to make my future by chasing opportunities.”
Shallah, the only one of the sisters who finished high school, says she is considering applying to an overseas university, with the hope of bringing her family with her. “For now, going to these classes [at the academy] gives me a little hope to go to university one day. Without this hope, my life would have ended by now.”
The youngest sister, Fatimah, recently sent her school certificates to the Iranian authorities to ask for help to return, but has had no response. She says she still hopes things will change in Afghanistan.
“I believe that one day, the Taliban will need the women to be educated. They will need women doctors to treat the sick and pregnant women of their family. So they will have no choice but to allow us to study eventually.”
* Names have been changed to protect their identities