This story is published in collaboration with Zan Times, a women-led investigative newsroom that covers human rights in Afghanistan, with a focus on women and the LGBTQ community.
BY 8 AM on a Wednesday morning in January, the 18-year-old Quran teacher in Herat, in western Afghanistan, was ready to head out to work. She had dressed the way she always had since the Taliban returned to power in 2021: in a long black dress and a manto – a traditional long coat – with her hair fully hidden with a black headband and a large scarf that covered her shoulders, a grey overcoat layered on top of it all and a black face mask. Over four years, the only changes in her attire had been in length and colour. Her clothes had grown longer, darker, heavier.
She stepped outside her home as she had hundreds of times before. She did not make it to her class.
She was standing by the roadside waiting for a taxi when a Taliban vehicle – a US-made Ford Ranger – pulled up beside her. Inside were three armed men in white clothing. They were the morality police, officers of the Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and Hearing of Complaints. “They asked me: who are you waiting for? Why are you alone? Where are you going? Where is your mahram?” she recalled in a phone interview to Zan Times. A mahram is a close male family member who, under Taliban laws, must act as guardians and accompany women as chaperones when they go out in public.