The order, when it came, was short and to the point: ‘Stop! These items are banned.’

The Taliban official who barked the words, flanked by a gunman, was referring to the contraceptives that my cousin, a midwife, was due to distribute at the rural clinic it had taken her two hours to reach by flatback truck on Afghanistan’s pitted muddy roads.

No matter the desperation of the women and girls she was meant to be helping – some as young as 14 – and whose anguished cries for help she had to ignore: this was a Taliban order, and if she tried to contravene it then she and her colleagues would be banned from the village altogether.

My cousin was brave enough to ask why, and was told Afghan women must stand firm in the face of a ‘Western conspiracy’ to control the Muslim population.

It’s why, for more than two years now, chemists in my country have reported contraceptive supplies like birth-control pills and condoms arriving first late, then in smaller quantities and then not at all.

Those that had them in stock have been instructed to remove them from their shelves and, in many regions, particularly the rural north, healthcare workers are now banned from distributing them on pain of draconian punishment.

Whatever the Taliban’s proclaimed motivation, my cousin certainly knows the devastating consequences. Unwanted pregnancies can be fraught with problems in remote rural communities, where it is not uncommon for women to suffer terribly in childbirth, or even lose their lives.

There are plenty of others who have endured so many pregnancies already that they are physically and emotionally shattered.

As another freezing winter drags on, plunging many areas into a humanitarian crisis of food and fuel deprivation, carrying a baby – and bringing another mouth to feed into the world – is the last thing many women want.

But none of this matters to the monsters who wish to subjugate Afghanistan’s women in every way they can and who have, since they came to power in August 2021, taken away every single one of our basic human rights and freedoms.

As I wrote in these pages of this newspaper almost two years ago, within three years of them sweeping into power, we had been banned from schools, offices, public baths, parks, and gyms – even from walking outside the confines of our home without a male escort and without being fully veiled.

Already, life felt like prison, and I thought then, as I shared my story, that things could not get worse. They have. Far worse.

For in the time since, the Taliban’s rule has become ever more repressive to women. Just last week, the Taliban published a new penal code which effectively puts women on a par with ‘slaves’, with clauses stating that either ‘slave masters’ or husbands can physically punish their wives and children – so long as it doesn’t cause broken bones or open wounds.

Not content with restricting our movements, our dress, and our actions – we can no longer sing, even in private – they are now controlling our bodies too. In some provinces, women can no longer be treated by male doctors. Nor can they study medicine, which in time means there will be no female doctors left.

What will happen to us then?

Day by day, moment by moment, they come for us in every way they can.

In September 2025, under the guise of ‘preventing immoralities’, the Taliban introduced targeted internet restrictions throughout the country, shutting down fibre-optic, broadband, and, in some cases, mobile data services, in doing so destroying the last hope of many women and girls who, banned from school after the age of 12, were using online learning in a desperate bid to continue their studies.

Five months on, connectivity remains sporadic, depriving women not only of access to education, but to each other, as they cannot even use the WhatsApp groups via which they share their despair.

It is why I am speaking out again, when the world seems to have turned its back on us. That is the sentiment shared by all my sisters in suffering, young and old, who see no future and who feel abandoned by the liberal women of the West who remain silent in the face of our suffering. Even as I write this, I struggle to convey the horror of our lives today. But how to truly share the desperation and the dangers we face day in day out?

There is no shortage of stories, and not those of strangers but people we know. Friends. Family. In a community north of Kabul, my friend Fatima was beaten by the religious police for walking in the market unaccompanied by her ‘mahram’ (male guardian) without a full face covering and with the backs of her hands exposed.

A mother of four, she had taken the risk as she had to buy provisions for her children and her husband – who is more than 20 years older but had previously been kind – was not home. She paid for it with a brutal beating.

Her husband, too, was punished for allowing her to leave home. His revenge for his wife’s ‘daring’ was to take another wife, reducing Fatima to the role of housekeeper and, as she tearfully told me over WhatsApp, the role of sexual slave when he chooses.

I can only look on in despair as I see the bleak messages from my once bubbly friend, who worked at a beauty salon, took pride in her fashionable clothes, and loved visiting cafes with her husband, but who now tells me she dares only leave home twice a week, always accompanied by a chaperone. When she does, fear sits on her shoulders.

And there are hundreds – thousands – of Fatimas, young women whose dreams have been crushed.

Today, 78 per cent of young Afghan women are not in education, employment or training, me among them. I used to work in a government job, but in 2023 the Taliban banned women from working in public offices, leaving my family and me reliant on the modest income of my brother.

When he marries, as he inevitably will, we face even greater poverty.

We are a few among millions living with empty cupboards and empty stomachs. Our family knows of another in which the four daughters were the breadwinners in their family of six. Two lost their jobs years ago, leaving the family reliant on the meagre wages of the two who work in public hospitals.

Now this is under threat. ‘If the Taliban take away this last source of income, we will starve’, their mother told me.

Is it any wonder that even the kindest fathers and brothers have now bowed to the system, marrying off their daughters and sisters to men they would once have turned away from the door to lessen the burden or to ensure their families’ safety: marriage to a Taliban official means not just financial support but security.

Already, ten per cent of girls are married by the age of 15, a number UN agencies have said will spiral if Taliban restrictions on girls’ education and women’s rights continues, as will teen childbirth, which by the end of this year is projected to have increased by 45 per cent since 2021. Maternal mortality is projected to increase by 50 per cent.

Behind those horrifying statistics lie countless terrible stories of individual human heartbreak, like the Afghan woman said to have recently advertised to sell her three year-old daughter on Facebook.

Thankfully, it did not come to pass: the family were contacted by a kindly elder who offered to help, promising a monthly payment to keep the infant with her mum. A happy ending of sorts.

Weddings, once an occasion for shared joy, are now all too often bleak and desperate affairs, populated by tearful, sometimes barely pubescent brides not yet 16 and female guests who struggle to conceal their fear and sadness.

Their despair is shared by women of all ages, but particularly the young. One female doctor I know told me that while there are no official statistics, she knows that many more are taking their own lives having barely reached adulthood: with nothing but survival itself to live for, they see no point in going on.

‘Why would they feel differently when they are silenced in public, restricted in travel, forced to cover their bodies from head to toe, have lost the chance of education after the age of 12 and often face abusive marriages they did not choose?’ she asked.

I know of at least one girl who has taken this devastating decision, a friend of the family who last year was found hanging from a rafter in an outbuilding in her village at the age of just 18 rather than facing marriage to a Taliban official 25 years older. Or so it was said: others said she was murdered by way of punishment, as her family had opposed the union too.

For those whose families were suspected of ‘collaboration’ with the West, meanwhile, there is permanent peril. In the dark days in which we now live, merely belonging to the same family as someone who once worked with the British or American forces merits arrest, punishment and even death.

Last year the Taliban executed the family of an Afghan man who had worked for the West and now lives in Germany, leaving behind his father, wife and young children who he hoped could join him later. He would never see them again: they were murdered, reportedly beheaded – including his two young daughters.

In the past month, I have heard of three attacks on women linked to Afghans who worked for Britain. And two months ago, the wife of an Afghan who worked with the Coalition was brutally gang-raped.

With such grotesque warnings in place, it is little wonder that a woman I know whose brother spent five years on the front line working as an interpreter is now on the run with her three young children.

Her sibling had hoped his sister and her family could join him in Britain, where he has been given sanctuary, but the application was turned down, leaving his sister and her husband at the mercy of the Taliban and their informers. Feeling the net closing in, they took the decision to flee their home under cover of darkness, with their children and little more than the clothes on her back.

They live in terror of being discovered. ‘Afghan women are punished in every way, even for the decisions of family members they have no influence over,’ she told me.

Despite all this, women have continued to find ways to resist. I know of a woman called Yalda, who runs a secret school in the basement of her husband’s carpet shop.

Her ‘classroom’ consists of little more than an old table, illuminated by two naked bulbs, but it is enough for the dozen 14-17 year-olds who visit each week thirsty for the knowledge that Yalda, a university-trained language teacher, can impart.

Every day brings with it the risk of discovery and punishment.

Only recently, one of her ‘pupils’ made the mistake of asking a friend if she would like to attend school, only for her to ask her father, who in turn immediately reported it to the Taliban. Yalda was terrified, although word got back to her in time for her to erase all traces of her illicit classroom.

‘There are many women like me who will not give in and allow our lives and spirits to be crushed,’ she told me. ‘I look at these girls, and it gives me hope. They face a bleak, bad future but education is hope and that is why the Taliban want to crush it. I will do this for as long as I am able.’

The girls, too, are at risk: while they take different routes to school so as not to attract attention, carry no books and if they are stopped claim they are looking for work in a nearby carpet factory, the presence of the morality police is a lurking menace.

Yalda and her friends do what they can to manage it: if there is known danger, the girls are sent emojis on their phones – a pencil with a thumbs down means ‘go home’. Yet the sporadic internet connection that blights their online learning means this cannot always be relied on.

‘We have to accept there is a risk, especially as the Taliban has become more rigid, more intense, more confident,’ Yalda says.

Sadly, their act of defiance comes wrapped in the thinnest of armour, for however hard they fight, a life of imprisonment awaits.

Perhaps worse, as one friend, confined by a forced marriage to a man she abhors, recently told me: there may be no physical bars holding her in, but her sentence is indefinite. ‘If I was in prison I would know when my sentence would end,’ she said. ‘My sentence as a housewife in a forced marriage is for life.’

• Names have been changed.