Five years of exclusion
The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. Nearly five years later, restrictions affecting women and girls are no longer confined to education or employment. They reach into public spaces, healthcare, clothing, movement, family life and the legal system.
The scale is measurable. Seventy-eight percent of young Afghan women are outside education, employment or training, nearly four times the rate for young men. Early childbearing is projected to rise sharply as a direct result, and denying girls secondary education alone is estimated to cost Afghanistan 2.5 percent of its GDP every year.
Those numbers reveal something larger than a collection of individual bans. They show how exclusion has become structural, reaching into how a household survives as much as how a woman is allowed to live.
Morality policing reaches everyday life
Between April and June 2026, Taliban morality enforcement produced at least 389 arbitrary arrests or detentions and 65 documented incidents of ill-treatment. Enforcement extended well beyond women, covering men’s beard length and haircuts, but women’s dress code violations remained the largest single category.
In Herat, at least 30 women were detained in June for allegedly violating mandatory dress requirements. Dozens more were warned. Residents subsequently protested the crackdown, gathering in the Jebrail district to demand the women’s release. Security forces responded with gunfire, killing a woman and a child and injuring others.
The episode illustrates how rules governing clothing can move from written restrictions to detention, protest and lethal consequences within the space of days.
The restrictions follow women into essential spaces
Girls continue to be barred from secondary school and women remain excluded from universities.
Work has narrowed too. By June 30, 2026, Afghan female personnel had been prevented from accessing UN premises for 296 consecutive days.
Healthcare is not insulated from morality enforcement either. Since November 2025, Herat province has required all female patients, caretakers, visitors and staff to wear a burqa before entering a healthcare facility. Women arriving without one have been turned away at hospital gates, and health workers have described waiting outside for hours until a burqa could be brought to them before they were permitted to begin their shifts. In at least one documented case, a woman requiring treatment was blocked from entering a hospital entirely.
At the same time, excluding girls from education threatens the future supply of female teachers and healthcare workers, creating another layer of long-term damage that compounds with each new school year.
The restrictions are being written into law
In May 2026, Decree No. 18, formally titled the Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses, was published in the Taliban’s official gazette.
The code upholds marriages arranged during childhood and further limits the circumstances in which women and girls can leave marriages. It also fails to establish a minimum marriage age, weakening protections against child and forced marriage. Among its most disputed provisions, the code allows a girl’s silence after she reaches puberty to be interpreted as her consent to a marriage already arranged on her behalf, while adult women and men are still required to give verbal consent. The provision implies that child marriage is now permitted under Taliban law.
That matters because restrictions once described primarily as policy are increasingly reinforced through formal legal structures, making them harder to reverse and easier to enforce.
International accountability has not dismantled the system
On July 8, 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, accusing them of the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds.
The warrants concern the systematic deprivation of women’s and girls’ rights to education, work, movement and public life since the Taliban’s return to power.
More than a year later, those warrants remain outstanding while the underlying restrictions continue, and in some cases have deepened.
Five years after the Taliban returned to power, Afghan women face exclusion across education, employment, healthcare, movement, clothing and marriage.
This is no longer one ban at a time.
It is a system.
By Shizza Umer
Sources
UN Women: https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/faqs-afghanistan
CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-afghanistan-protesters-shot-herat-women-girls-hijab-rules/
UN News (UNAMA field report): https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1168039
Amnesty International (Decree No. 18): https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/06/afghanistan-new-code-enabling-child-marriage-compounds-dismal-situation-for-womens-and-girls-rights/
Amnesty International (Afghanistan country report): https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-asia/afghanistan/report-afghanistan/
International Criminal Court: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-afghanistan-icc-pre-trial-chamber-ii-issues-arrest-warrants-haibatullah-akhundzada
