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For two decades, Afghan women and girls won several life-changing opportunities that women of the West may take for granted. These included their rights to earn an education, work, show their skin in public, and even walk freely outdoors. 

These freedoms were tragically stripped away on August 15, 2021, when the Biden-Harris Administration haphazardly withdrew the U.S.’s military presence from Afghanistan, leaving the country to fall to the Taliban. Afghan women and girls are now paying a heavy price.

“Women are oppressed. All their rights are taken away from them,” Azizullah Aziz, a former Afghan interpreter for the U.S. Military (JSOC), told IW Features. “They are used like the slaves back in the old days that people were using.”

Aziz and his family made a harrowing escape from their home in Kabul, Afghanistan, five days after the fall. They were rescued and resituated in a United Arab Emirates humanitarian center for eight months before finally making it to America. 

Aziz, his wife Khatera, and 19-year-old daughter Mashhouda spoke with IW Features to sound the alarm about the dire situation Afghan women and girls were left in — and how that situation continues to grow worse. 

The Fall

Mashhouda remembered the exact moment on August 15th when she heard the news: the Taliban took over Kabul. It was lunchtime, she recalled, but no one was eating because she suddenly couldn’t see a future for herself.

Thousands of people –– Afghans and foreign nationals –– flooded the Kabul airport, attempting to flee the country. Many died in the process.

As U.S. airplanes departed and officials from the U.S.-supported Afghan government were murdered, Azizullah said his daughters asked him why he was so afraid.

“My wife told me that ‘You are a businessman. You shouldn’t be afraid. They’re not going to touch you. They will probably go after all those people who are military people.’ I’m like, ‘You have no idea.’”

For 16 years, Aziz secretly served as a combat interpreter and facilitator with the U.S. military. He first served the U.S. Army 3rd Special Forces Group, the U.S. State Department Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, and was finally hand-selected to serve at the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Anyone involved with the U.S. became a target for Taliban terror. So, to his family’s surprise, Aziz told them to pack up and prepare for an escape. 

In the days afterward, they lived on the streets, in nooks and crannies of tall mountains, even inside a taxi. But on August 20, 2021, a group of retired Marines and Special Operations Officers rescued Aziz and his family from Kabul, Afghanistan, and brought them to the United Arab Emirates. On April 14, 2022, they made it to the U.S.

“I’m lucky I got evacuated,” Aziz said. “Not everyone is lucky.”

The Fallout

In the three years since the Biden-Harris Administration’s chaotic withdrawal from the region, the lights have gone out completely for the Afghan women and girls left behind.

The Taliban has banned girls and women from going to school, entering public parks or sports clubs, driving a car, serving in public office, and going outside without a male escort. Just this month, the terrorist group implemented an order prohibiting women from speaking in public or even showing their bare faces.

If they protest, Aziz explained, the women are taken into custody and sometimes brutalized, raped, and killed. 

Female students and working women, in particular, have been subjected to draconian restrictions and outright torture at the hands of the Taliban. An unnamed activist was gang-raped and tortured by armed Taliban men and, in a video obtained by The Guardian, was told, “You’ve been f***ed by Americans all these years and now it’s our turn.” 

One 25-year-old Afghan YouTuber, Hora Sadat, mysteriously died after attending a public event. Another activist, Freshta Kohistani, was shot dead in a wave of similar assassinations. Hundreds of reported cases of femicide in Afghanistan have emerged since America withdrew from the region, and new data analysis suggested that’s just “the tip of the iceberg.”

“Women [are] used as slave[s] in Afghanistan,” Azizullah explained. “Life has become a hell in Afghanistan for both men, women, and the girls… for everybody.”

Khatera and Mashhouda remain in contact with their friends back home to the best of their ability, but the situation is bleak. Afghan women, Mashhoda said, have lost “all their hope in the whole world.” 

During the fall of Kabul, women hoped neighboring countries or humanitarian organizations would advocate for them. “But we heard no voice, no sound, no one was complaining,” said Mashhouda. “No one stood beside them, not just the [West], but the whole world.” They’ve been abandoned.

As a result, the only options left to the average Afghan woman is to be “used just as a tool inside the house to do the dishes, serve the meal, and be a wife to somebody,” said Khatera. 

Had the Aziz family remained in Afghanistan, that would have been Aziz’s daughters’  best-case scenario. More likely, the Aziz daughters would have been forced into marriage and stripped of their freedoms, Aziz said, and his sons would have been either kidnapped or killed.

But now that they live in the United States and have planted roots in Texas, Khatera Aziz said her dreams — and her daughters’ dreams — have come true.

The Fight Ahead

Mashhouda is one of six siblings: three boys and three girls. As a young artist, she hopes to major in something related to art in college, but she also teaches and competes in Taekwondo at a local studio. Her older brother is in college and works in IT at an electricity company, and her younger siblings are exploring art or athletics.

“I’m really happy about them that they’re finally seeing and experiencing freedom, their own freedom of choice, freedom of thinking and freedom of choosing what they want to do,” Mashhouda Aziz said.

Despite these promising new horizons, thinking of their friends and family back home often brings them to tears. The Aziz family stressed how important it is to draw attention to the worsening gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Aziz called on the United States government, from those in the White House to those in Congress, to care about the plight of Afghan women and “actually recognize the gender apartheid as a heinous crime against humanity.”

Between tears, Mashhoda Aziz agreed.

It’s “not just a story to be heard” and then forgotten; she said, “My message for America and Americans is: Please don’t forget Afghanistan and Afghan girls. Please.”

Written & produced by Andrea Mew, with contributions by Kelsey Bolar and Samantha Aschieris