Why America’s hasty departure kills all hope for the lives of Afghanistan’s women and girls

Dev Maitra used to teach Afghan refugees at a London comprehensive. Here he recalls the stories they told him about the unimaginable horror of life under the Taliban

Afghan women and girls face the return of a regime that dehumanises them (AFP/Getty)

I vividly remember watching a Channel 4 documentary in 2001, a matter of months after 9/11, in which a reporter had travelled to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, filming covertly for the duration of the trip, the footage grainy and chilling. Through sheer coincidence it had been shot earlier that year, before the Tuesday in 2001 that changed the world, and before Afghanistan was on all our lips and television screens.

I rewatched that documentary earlier this year, but even before this, for the past two decades I had remembered the images of blue burqa-clad women begging for bread, abandoned by their husbands yet legally forbidden from working under Taliban rule; I also remembered the secret girls’ schools and, most harrowingly of all, the woman in a blue burqa executed by the Taliban for adultery in the “execution square”, which was once a football field.

As she was fatally shot, her body slumped into a heap on the ground, while hundreds looked on. I thought at the time, and still think, of the utter bravery and daring of filming undercover, to show, in brutally vivid detail to viewers in the UK, the unbearable oppression in which Afghan citizens (particularly women) were forced to exist; it was both heartbreaking and extraordinary. The programme was filmed and first broadcast in 2001, before social media, before YouTube, before I had the internet. It was profound to my 15-year-old self.