In Kabul, the air feels heavier than usual — thick with fear and whispers. Phones keep ringing; parents and siblings anxiously ask: “Is your daughter home? Don’t let her go outside.”
The Taliban have once again descended, this time with blacked-out SUVs, cold stares, and ruthless hands, snatching women off the streets, from markets, even from hospitals — and disappearing them into the shadows.
These are not simply arrests. They are statements — loud, deliberate, and brutal. They are reminders that in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, a woman’s body remains their preferred stage for asserting control.
Women fully veiled, masked, obedient to even the harshest dress codes, are still pulled from crowds. Why? Because the point was never the veil. The point was never morality. The point was fear.
This is not about religion. It’s about power.
It’s about terrorizing women back into silence — punishing them for simply existing in public spaces, for daring to walk, to breathe, to stand.
And yet, in the same streets where women are thrown into black vehicles, their voices still echo: “We will not be silent.”
Even as they are abducted and tortured, their resistance endures — in whispers, in videos posted in defiance, in the very act of continuing to walk the streets of Kabul.
These are not isolated incidents. This is a systematic, state-sponsored campaign of intimidation designed to break not just individual women, but the collective spirit of resistance.
It is not enough for the Taliban to exclude women from schools and workplaces; now they are hunting them in plain daylight, with impunity, under the world’s gaze — and the world, disgracefully, remains largely silent.
Every woman taken is not just a victim; she is a warning. And every woman who speaks up despite the fear is a hero.
The Taliban want to convince women that Kabul is no longer theirs. But they fail to understand: without its women, Kabul is nothing but ruins.
What is perhaps most shameful is not only what the Taliban are doing, but also how the world tolerates it — how international actors flirt with legitimizing them even as women are disappeared into prisons and unknown graves.
To abduct women is not simply to erase them — it is to shred the dignity of a nation. And yet, dignity cannot be erased with blacked-out SUVs and iron bars.
Women in Kabul may be abducted.
They may be silenced for a moment.
But they will return.
Because Kabul without its women is not Kabul.
And Afghanistan without its women is already lost.
