The first time I met the Afghan activist Hoda Khamosh, in 2023, I slipped on the ice that still covered the street in Oslo in March. We had been chatting as we walked along: about the weather and Norwegians’ sense of humor, about her asylum application, about protesting against the Taliban. “If nobody speaks out,” said Khamosh, who was 27 at the time, “the world will conclude, ‘Well, it’s fine then.’”
“We need to raise our voices,” she added. Then I fell, and after I struggled up, she said she had a video to show me.
The video was from a night when Khamosh and her friends decided to go out for ice cream. “A little crazy,” she laughed, the idea of getting ice cream at 9 p.m., and in such weather; the day before, it had rained, and there was ice under the snow. They were walking along when her friend Sahar slipped; then another friend, Ayham, trying to help her, slammed to the ground. Then Sahar’s sister fell, too. “In five seconds, five people fell,” Khamosh said. They were all left scrambling on the ice together. In the three years since she arrived in Norway, Khamosh has entered a loose-knit community of refugees trying to help one another up, so to speak, even while walking on slippery ground themselves.
Offering support to other refugees was a natural outgrowth of the work in Afghanistan that landed Khamosh in need of asylum in the first place. Khamosh was a high-profile member of the women’s protest movement that swept through Kabul after the Taliban’s return to power and the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021. In January 2022, she volunteered to go to Norway to speak (not negotiate, she emphasizes) with the Taliban on behalf of the women protesters. After that meeting, she was forced into exile. She resettled in Norway, where she continues to organize parts of the protest movement.
Since she left Afghanistan, things have gotten worse — much worse — for women there. The country is now under a regime of gender apartheid, to use a term that advocates including Khamosh have pushed for in international forums. Women and girls are banned from almost every aspect of public life, including secondary schools and universities and most professions. They cannot enter public parks. Women’s spaces, such as beauty salons (which once employed an estimated 60,000 women) have shut down. Women reportedly need male guardians even during emergencies, such as being driven to a hospital while in labor. According to the Afghan Witness project at the Centre for Information Resilience, between 2022 and 2024, there were 332 femicides — 54 of them perpetrated by the Taliban. The same report found that the group was responsible for over half the recorded instances of gender-based violence.
On top of such oppressive conditions, there is the country’s economic collapse, which has fallen particularly hard on women. I’ve spoken to women who were already barely getting by — because their husbands were in the now-disbanded army, or they were low-paid civil servants, such as teachers, whose salaries were slashed or went unpaid — who are now desperate. There are also an estimated 2.5 million widows in Afghanistan after two decades of war. Huge numbers of women and children are suffering from malnutrition.
I first met Khamosh in 2023 and then again in late 2024. To watch her work as an activist-in-exile is to watch an Afghan woman fill the gaps left by the NGOs and international institutions rendered inert and ineffective by the Taliban’s stunning retrenchment, by U.S., U.N., and other countries’ sanctions, by the lack of access to women inside the country. And it is to watch her do this while navigating life as a refugee in an increasingly hostile Europe. The gap between our meetings also saw a change in the possibilities of protest as the Taliban’s crackdown on women activists intensified. The work had become less visible on the streets but no less active.
Every day that I spend with her, Khamosh is working her contacts on WhatsApp, planning gatherings. She told me she organizes underground classes and indoor protests in Iran, Pakistan, and even inside Afghanistan. She is constantly in touch with people on the ground, always raising money for emergencies. “It’s hard,” Khamosh told me, “but quietly, slowly, we gather women.”
Khamosh says the Taliban has criticized her for trying to help Afghan women while living in exile: “They say those who are outside can’t work inside the country, can’t interfere.” But, she says, “We didn’t leave because we wanted to. You forced us to leave. And it’s up to us to retake our country.”
Khamosh was born in 1996, in Iran, to a family from Badakhshan, in northeast Afghanistan. Around 2008, her family returned to northern Afghanistan, settling in a village called Taghma, in Salang, a district of Parwan. There was no school in the village, but Khamosh learned to read the Quran at the mosque. By the time she was a teenager, she could translate the holy book’s verses from Arabic to Farsi. She began to read fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, and other books on religion. She grew so knowledgeable that she was asked to teach the younger girls. At home, she was strict — she recalls scolding her mother when she thought her mother’s clothes weren’t modest enough. But when a girls’ school opened in the village, Khamosh encouraged reluctant families to let their children attend — she’d offer to walk them to school and back home. (What made the difference, for most parents, was the direct aid given to students in the form of food and clothes.)
It was the radio stations that Khamosh began to listen to, once electricity arrived in Salang, that gave her a sense that there was something beyond a life of strict religious confines. Popular music and entertainment channels such as Arman FM and Khurshid FM would give out a number so listeners could contact them, and Khamosh would message the DJs to ask about life in Kabul and beyond. “My mind changed,” she told me.
When she was 16, Khamosh’s mother was killed in their home. Khamosh discovered the body. The killer was never identified, but the family believed it was someone who “didn’t like a woman who was free, who went out to work without a burqa,” said Khamosh. Years later, Khamosh’s sister was also killed, after she rejected a suitor’s proposal; the man they suspected was never brought to justice.
“These first two murders were a gradual death for me,” Khamosh said. “But then I became strong. I learned to fight for their voices, to try to prevent other women like my mother and sister from being killed.”
Khamosh’s father had wanted her to marry right after her mother’s death, but she asked to sit the university entrance exams instead. He told her she’d have one shot at passing. She did and was accepted to Kabul University.
The man Khamosh went on to marry, Jassor, is from the same region. (When I met him in Norway, he went without a coat. “I’m a boy from Badakhshan,” he said, adding that the climate of Oslo and the province were similar.) Jassor says that he underwent a similar political and personal evolution as Khamosh, moving from what he described as the strict religious ideology of his school to a freer exchange of ideas in Kabul. In his village, “In the morning, we’d study at school, and at night, we’d learn from Talibs who taught from texts about religious and historical figures,” Jassor said. “If I hadn’t changed direction, I would have been a Talib myself.”
The Taliban appealed to young men, especially those in the villages like him, Jassor said, by offering a simple code that youth could grasp. It was something different than the general backdrop of corruption, joblessness, and hopelessness faced by those without connections and the right educational opportunities — those who didn’t speak English or have the opportunity to study abroad.
After university, Khamosh returned to her village, working with an NGO and writing poetry in Farsi. She went to Kabul often for readings and get-togethers, making a name for herself with unusually forthright poems about love, sex, and relationships that often drew on stories she heard from the women in her village. Although she knew her family wouldn’t approve of her poems, she thought they’d never know about them because she wrote under a pseudonym. Her first book, called Kissing You, caused a stir, and her family learned about it. When she returned home after a reading for it, her father beat her, calling her a whore, and her aunt’s husband threatened to kill her. She told Jassor, who she’d met at the reading, about what had happened, and they became friends, although he had a girlfriend. After a year or so, she posted a lovelorn letter, addressing him by name, on Facebook. She thought it would get two or three likes, but she woke to her father pulling her hair, yelling, “What have you done?” The letter had gone viral. She was beaten again and locked in the house for days, but not long after, Jassor arrived to ask for her hand.
After they married and moved in together in Kabul, the young couple had only a few months to themselves. It was 2021, and province after province was falling to the Taliban. Their home became a refuge for young men and women from Parwan and Badakhshan fleeing the war. Families were sending young women in particular out of fear of sexual violence. Displaced people were turning up in the capital in droves, setting up tents in parks. Khamosh raised money for the new arrivals and tried to help women and girls by distributing clothes, period supplies, and other essentials. “From Herat, Nimruz, from every province people would come to Kabul. They had no homes, no food, no water,” she told me.
They had been told, Khamosh explained, that provinces would fall, but Kabul was safe. Her group chats turned into mini news agencies. “Everything we were witness to” would be shared, she said, “then slowly, those groups turned into protest groups.” Khamosh was 25 that August when the Taliban seized power for the second time, the first time being the year she was born, 1996. She and her friends and colleagues began to question what would happen if the Taliban didn’t keep their public promises that they would protect women’s rights, including access to education.
Joining the first protests against the new regime wasn’t a straightforward decision, however. Khamosh’s family didn’t want her to go out, nor did Jassor. “You’ll get yourself killed,” they told her, gathered in the living room of their home. Khamosh battled with herself, she told me: “Don’t go, you’ll get killed, it’s dangerous”; then, “No. Go, go.” At her first protest near the presidential palace, the message to the Taliban was “education, work, freedom.” Later, other slogans emerged: “We are not the women of 1996”; “Don’t give the Taliban international legitimacy”; “Bread, work, freedom.”
In January 2022, at a protest near Kabul University — against the enforced hijab, where protesters burned a white burqa — members of the Taliban beat Khamosh with their guns. It was strange, she recalled, that the Talib who hit her wore an American uniform. The protest was violent; journalists were detained and tortured, and demonstrators violently abused.
And why weren’t they the women of 1996? The women who were, in many cases, their mothers? “They silenced our mothers,” Khamosh told me. “They forced them to stay home. We’ve seen our mothers tortured. They couldn’t raise their voices, but we have. That’s the difference. In comparison to their silence, we’ve raised our voices. Our children won’t be like that either. That’s the difference.”
In early 2022, Norway convened a meeting between the Taliban and the envoys of several European countries, including Germany, France, and the U.K. Khamosh volunteered to represent the protest movement for a session on women’s rights. The meeting, according to the Norwegian foreign minister, did not represent international “recognition” of the group, but it was intended to open avenues for engagement. “We cannot allow the political situation to lead to an even worse humanitarian disaster,” the minister said in a statement at the time.
Then, as now, many Afghan women disagreed on the appropriate international response to the Taliban — on questions about sanctions and aid and international law. Those divides do not always map neatly onto other political positions, such as opinions on the U.S. withdrawal and 20-year occupation, the experience of which varied widely among Afghans.
Khamosh believed she was speaking for other women protesters in opposing recognition and also international cash shipments to the country (used to pay for aid programs.) “I stood by the boycott of Taliban leaders at the negotiating table, and [was against] sending them money that could strengthen them,” she said.
Before Khamosh flew to Norway on the night of January 19, the Taliban abducted five women. The protester Tamana Zaryab Paryani and her three sisters, Zarmina, Shafiqa, and Karima, were taken from their home by armed men, and the activist Parwana Ibrhaimkhail was seized in the capital. Paryani filmed her captors as they entered the house, and her screams and the cries of her sisters spread across social media.
At the meeting on January 23, in a hotel conference room, Khamosh publicly confronted the Taliban about the abductions. Face mask tucked under her chin, Khamosh held up photos, printed on A4 sheets of paper, of Ibrahimkhail and Paryani. “Pick up the phone and call Kabul,” she said to the Taliban’s then-foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who sat opposite her, demanding the women’s release. She also asked for the release of Alia Azizi, a disappeared policewoman (whose whereabouts remain unknown today). According to Khamosh, Muttaqi at first denied that anyone had been abducted. Then, he actually did pick up the phone — only to quickly change his tone, she said, and laugh nervously and hang up. She heard someone on the other line confirm they had the women in custody. He dismissed her concerns, she told me.
For Afghans and others following the situation there, Khamosh’s stand in Norway caused a sensation. Her speech flew across social media, and many people messaged her; journalists, politicians, and activists wanted to meet her. Her words crystalized the collective anger, fear, and frustration at the extraordinary disappearances of the women protesters, all the more audacious in the context of the Taliban’s first international meeting that included Afghan women after their takeover.
Her raised profile would be a threat when she returned, she knew; at the meeting, U.S. and Norwegian officials had asked the Taliban to guarantee her safety, but they would make no promises. So she stayed on in Norway, agonizing over the question of whether to go home or to ask for asylum. She received hateful messages during this time, she told me, things like, “If you dare come back — watch what will happen — we’ll turn your head into a football.” She thought she would be killed, she said.
Ultimately, speaking to a psychologist helped her clarify what she wanted to do, as did the support she received from Norwegians she met, fellow activists, and others who wanted to help. In Afghanistan, her husband and family had been threatened. She thought about their safety as well as her own. She finally made an asylum claim.
Khamosh’s application for asylum took more than six months to be accepted. “But didn’t you all invite me here?” Khamosh told me she used to joke with officials when asking for updates on her case. Khamosh is full of laughter and verve, but beneath her energetic good humor, it’s clear that she has also suffered profound distress.
While her asylum claim was pending, Khamosh lived in a camp in Kongsvinger, a municipality just over 50 miles northeast of Oslo, closer to Sweden than to the capital. The camp was a two-story building with a library, bowling lanes, kitchen, and lounge, and an upper floor lined with twin bedrooms. There were women from Ukraine and Syria mostly; she was among the few from Afghanistan. She had a small room with space for a bed and a fridge, which she shared for many months with a roommate. There was no space to be alone and think. “They wouldn’t allow it,” she said. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she would go to a patch of trees near a tributary of the Glomma River, which flows by the camp. She called it “the jungle.” There, she would scream to let it all out: the horrible stories friends and relatives and desperate strangers had told her; her own nightmares. The news from Afghanistan was like a voice that beat in her head.
Other refugees told her of their harrowing journeys to Norway by boat or on foot. Many of them had experienced assault, harassment, or rape, or narrowly escaped it. The conversations were wrenching, but Khamosh was drawn to them. How many women risked death and violence along such routes — all because their country is no longer a safe place for them to live? Listening to the other women gave her a sense of purpose. She wanted to tell their stories, and she wanted to organize to help them.
The stories she encountered about her compatriots were sometimes complicated, and contradictory. One man in his fifties cried to an interpreter that he wanted to go back to Afghanistan — he feared his daughter would want to become Norwegian and would lose her ties to their culture, by which, Khamosh thought, he meant she might become less conservative. Another friend had said something out of desperation that wasn’t quite true in an asylum claim, and he worried that his own mother, who wanted to return, would out him. Some “people had built their lives out of bricks of lies” and were living under enormous pressure, it seemed to Khamosh.
Khamosh continued to work to help release women detained and disappeared by the Taliban. She posted photos of the women, generating hashtags and campaigns for their release. I remember coming across one photo she posted of a woman whose back had been whipped. This work strengthened her. The Taliban were afraid of women, she said, and of women’s voices getting out through the media. And people were desperate for help. She told me that one morning in 2023, she got a call from a woman in Daikundi province, who screamed at her, “My daughter’s just been killed.” What would she do about it?
“We can’t protest inside Afghanistan now,” Khamosh told me matter-of-factly. “At first, when we protested it wasn’t that hard — [yes,] the Taliban would use tear gas, beat women. But now, everyone they stop, they detain.” She added, “They’ve detained women and taken compromising photos. They take a lot of money from their families, land, cars. For a household that has no work, no employment or income, that’s really hard.” Another activist told me that the Taliban would extract another particularly gruesome form of “guarantee” from the families of detained activists: Either the women stop their protests, or they or their family members would be beheaded.
For Khamosh, it was a question of changing tactics and broadening strategy. Now she organizes underground classes for girls in Kabul and other provinces like Mazar-e-Sharif, Parwan, and Bamiyan in northern and central Afghanistan. Her organization, which she has registered in Norway, also runs online programs on depression and suicide prevention — many women in Afghanistan are at greater risk because women are unemployed and always at home, Khamosh told me.
Khamosh holds weekly meetings with women in Afghanistan. “And when [the women] see it’s good for them, they invite others,” she said. “We have small conferences inside Afghanistan … In Pakistan, where there are migrants — women who have fled, who can’t study — we have educational programs and protests.” Khamosh says they have found allies in women’s rights organizations in Pakistan, who are ready to share resources and carry out programming. For instance, observing that many of the Afghan women she worked with in Pakistan were experiencing depression, Khamosh worked with a Pakistani women’s rights organization to get a psychologist to offer group sessions at their office.
Khamosh is quick to insist that she doesn’t work alone — the women organize and plan collectively. They try to help women in need — for instance, those experiencing domestic violence — by quickly raising money from other Afghans or sometimes using their personal funds. She told me about getting one teenager to another province and about helping wounded women get to the hospital.
When working with women and other activists inside Afghanistan, Khamosh says, she’s constantly conscious of their security. “You have to plan a lot. [Tell them to] delete their messages.” She tells women who need medical treatment, “If you go to the hospital, don’t take your phone. If you do, leave the group chat and I’ll add you when you get back.”
She sees part of her role as emotional support for the mostly young women she is in touch with. She often addresses them with the word azizam, which is used as an endearment in Farsi. “I speak in a kind way with them,” she says. “I know that society hurts them.” She adds, “Even though they’re 19 or 16, they’re strong.”
She also urges caution, telling the women and girls, “You are important. Your family is important. Don’t do something that we will regret. Evaluate the situation fully.” She told me that they’re careful to “work quietly and slowly.” For the protests they do plan, such as one for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women last November, she tells her colleagues to make arrangements stealthily — and well in advance. “When shopkeepers see we are buying paper, markers, etc., they know it’s for slogans, and we’re afraid of the shopkeepers — we don’t want them to inform. So we ask for help. We have men — they’re not in the group, but we reach out to them. We say, ‘Would you buy your wife paper?’ And they say, ‘I have to, it’s my duty.’”
Dire as the situation is, Khamosh does not believe the Taliban is invincible; she thinks that recent fissures in the group show their tenure is unsustainable. Analysts point to a divide between the group’s emir in Kandahar and the Haqqani faction in Kabul. The Haqqanis’ main concern is “securing their power and economic interest,” said Weeda Mehran, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter in England, while the emir wants “absolute concentrated power, with all decisions signed off by him in Kandahar.” It has been reported that the Taliban Minister of Interior Affairs Sirajuddin Haqqani and Defense Minister Mullah Yaqoob are opposed to the girls’ school education bans. But Mehran cautions considering the Haqqanis as a “moderate” alternative to the supreme leader and his Kandahari network. “There is nothing moderate about the Haqqanis. They are responsible for the most egregious attacks against civilians in the past two decades and have actively silenced voices of dissent since the Taliban’s rise to power.”
When I visited last November, Khamosh was seven months pregnant. (Jassor had joined her in Norway in January 2024). She was taking Norwegian language classes at an adult education center. On a Friday, in a small classroom overlooking a patio with trees and a picnic table, around a dozen students gathered to play language games.
A woman wearing a knitted friendship bracelet with watermelon slices led the class. “This teacher is strict,” Khamosh said, as we took our seats. After explaining the games — Scrabble and a word-guessing game where you describe an image on a card without naming it — the teacher walked among the students and stopped to listen, to check their words and help.
Khamosh played Scrabble with a man from Turkey; “eie” (own), she spelled out, and “sokte” (searched). Norwegian seems to have come to Khamosh easily, and she enjoys speaking it. “I steal words from everywhere,” she told me: street signs, anything.
But Khamosh was also on her phone, messaging. She was planning a conference in Pakistan the next day, and at the last minute, two Norwegian NGOs had asked if they could attend. She had to figure out logistics and catering.
Khamosh meets every two weeks with Afghan women in Oslo. She explained to me her concerns about Norway’s family laws, under which women going through hard times have had their children put into foster care. “If you fight with your husband, if you have severe depression, they can take your child,” she said. She also helps people who are struggling with asylum applications for their relatives. After class, another teacher asked Khamosh to come to a local council meeting to advocate for the immigrant women in her area.
Not everyone is so welcoming. Even among some of the teachers, Khamosh has encountered complaints that immigrants are living cushy lives in good neighborhoods at the expense of ordinary Norwegians. Norway, like other Northern European countries, has in recent years reversed some of the policies that made it welcoming for asylum-seekers and refugees.
Still, a 2024 judgment from the European Court of Justice forced member countries to officially recognize the extremity of the situation for women in Afghanistan: They do not need to prove specific persecution to be granted asylum. Simply being female is enough.
Later that day, on the train to meet a friend at the Black Friday sales, Khamosh sent a voice note over WhatsApp and messaged her colleagues in Iran about another event they were organizing. (“They don’t just accept decisions sometimes. Everything is a discussion,” she complained, smiling.) As in Afghanistan, in Iran, it is risky to gather in the streets. However, Khamosh told me about a large, clandestine gathering of women in a private home. Such “indoor protests” are sometimes filmed and spread on social media, but they are also a chance for women to plan and strategize in person.
Khamosh had marked Black Friday in her mind’s diary for a while. She wanted to look at things for the baby — strollers, clothes, baby bouncers. Rowida, her friend, was already at Storo Storsenter, Oslo’s biggest mall, housed in a brutalist-looking concrete building several stories tall. “She grew up in Iran, came here by water,” Khamosh said by way of introduction.
Rowida, a 27-year-old undergraduate student and single parent to an 11-year-old daughter, was in the market for a new perfume. They walked into a store and tested a few. “None of the ones that I like are on sale,” she said, spraying her wrist. Walking around the mall, Khamosh told Rowida how she discovered she was pregnant. She had fainted and woken up in a hospital, where a doctor told her the news. It wasn’t something she planned, and she told him that. “I’m too young,” she said.
“So don’t have it,” the doctor had replied. “I told him, ‘Now the baby’s here — it’s here.’” she explained to Rowida. She marveled at how easily he had said, “So just don’t have it.”
In the shops, not much that Khamosh had in mind for the baby was marked down. The strollers were nice but full price, as was a baby bouncer. And none of the clothes seemed right to her.
“What about this?” Rowida asked, touching a onesie.
“That’s too big. The baby’s going to be tiny,” Khamosh said.
The next evening, Khamosh and Jassor went to see an apartment. They wanted to find a new place where the baby could have its own room. They had missed the bus and decided to walk. There were sparkles of snow on the ground. The next day, it would snow heavily — the first real snowfall of the winter. As we walked, they both remarked that the black hills with lights reminded them of the hills of Kabul at night, inlaid with the houses people had built.
Neggeen Sadid is a freelance writer based in London.
