✍️ By: Hamia Naderi
When Habiba Sarabi was appointed governor of Bamiyan in March 2005, even then-President Hamid Karzai doubted whether people would accept a woman in such a role. She responded confidently: “Of course they will.”
Despite protests by supporters of the previous governor, her arrival in Bamiyan was met with widespread public support, marking her as the first female governor in Afghanistan’s history.
Born in Baghlan in 1958 to a family from Sarab, Ghazni, Sarabi was the only daughter among four sons. She later recalled her father beating her without cause, favoring her brothers instead.
She completed her schooling in Baghlan, Kapisa, and Kabul, earning a degree in hematology from Kabul University’s pharmacy faculty in 1981. She became a lecturer at the Kabul Institute of Medicine.
When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, Sarabi — then a mother of three — was forced to stop teaching and fled to Pakistan so her daughter could continue her education. There, she taught girls in refugee camps and supported underground schools for Afghan girls.
During the Taliban’s first regime, she secretly returned to Afghanistan three times, wearing a burqa, to visit clandestine girls’ schools. She recounted falling in Kabul because she could not see under the burqa without her glasses: “I hurt my knees that day.”
After the Taliban fell in 2001, Sarabi returned to Kabul and was appointed Minister of Women’s Affairs in 2002. In 2005 she became governor of Bamiyan, a post she held for eight years before entering the 2014 presidential race as a vice-presidential candidate alongside Zalmai Rassoul.
She later served as an advisor on women and youth to the Chief Executive and as deputy of the High Peace Council. In 2020, she joined the Afghan government’s 21-member peace negotiation team, sitting across from the Taliban in Doha and repeatedly insisting that “the Taliban’s mentality toward women has not changed.”
After the fall of Kabul in August 2021, Sarabi fled Afghanistan once again.
Over her career, she has received several international awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Leadership (2013), UNDP’s Global Peace Award (2016), and France’s Simone Veil Prize (2020). In 2008, Time named her an “Environmental Hero” for helping establish Band-e Amir as Afghanistan’s first national park.
Today, Habiba Sarabi continues to advocate for Afghan women and urges the international community: “Do not recognize the Taliban.”
