Back in Kabul, in the good old days, Zahra Joya would rush home from work every evening to drink tea with her family. Everyone would gather in a little circle around the pot, sharing their stories. It was her favourite part of the day. "It was a simple life, but it was a very beautiful life," she says.
That existence was blown apart in 2021, when international forces pulled out of Afghanistan. Now in London, the founder of Rukhshana Media spends every waking moment publishing the stories of women and girls who live under Taliban rule. On some level, she's still there, managing her team of journalists, who risk their lives to ensure the world never forgets.
"Physically, I'm in the UK and safe," she says. "Mentally, I'm not. I'm in Afghanistan."
The return of the Taliban
Listening to Joya, it's as though she's stuck in a bad dream from which she can't awaken. Back in 2020, when she set up Rukhshana with her personal savings, recruiting female journalists from around the country, she believed Afghanistan's best days were yet to come. The agency was named in honour of a girl who had been stoned to death after trying to escape a forced marriage.
Nearly two decades on from the US-led invasion, the country had changed beyond recognition, making huge progress on women's rights and media freedoms. Memories of the Taliban's brutal reign had started to fade. "Nobody in Afghanistan ever imagined that Kabul would fall and the Taliban would come back overnight," says Joya. "It seemed impossible."
Joya is still struggling to process what followed - the chaos of those final terrifying days at Kabul Airport, from where she was airlifted out of the country by the UK government, along with her three sisters, her brother and her niece. Who can forget those haunting images of desperate Afghans clinging to the side of a US Air Force plane, falling to their deaths after it took off? Within days, the Taliban had seized back power.
Before the US pulled out
Joya's remarkable life reflects the country's recent history, spanning the first phase of Taliban rule and that dawning of a new era of hope and optimism. Born in Bamyan Province in the central highlands, location of the ancient Buddha statues blown up by the Taliban in early 2001, she was spared the worst of the regime. As a member of the Hazara community, an ethnic group with relatively liberal values, she received an education - though she had to disguise herself as a boy to attend school.
Back then, she was known as Mohammed. Every day, she would dress in her boy's outfit and walk two hours to school in Sultan Rabat village, where she joined her peers in games of football. To this day, she is grateful for her parents' courage. "In Hazara families, they will prefer to buy books over food," she says. "In our community, women still have their own rights."
Under the US-backed regime, the Hazara prospered. Joya studied law at university, later discovering her passion for journalism. "We passed through 20 years of freedom, building a life," she says. "Before, there was no freedom, no technology. But we got educated, started to rebuild." By 2021, the nation had grown in confidence, started to believe in a better future. At least that's what Joya thought before the US, against all logic, decided to pull out.
Now, dreams are turning to dust
The return of the Taliban has been a bitter pill. Joya speaks of her 12-year-old cousin, now unable to finish her final year of elementary school. This is her last year of education. "It's very sad. She has no motivation," she says. What future awaits this child, who may now be destined for a life of domestic servitude? Joya's pain at seeing a young relative's dreams turned to dust is palpable.
"The young generation is very vulnerable, especially because they started out as free women," she says. "Now, there are lots of stories about young girls who are not allowed to go to school and have fallen into a very deep depression."
Joya was dismayed to see the Taliban play the Western media, attempting to convince the world that things would be different this time round. Soon, however, the regime began to show its true colours, requiring women to cover themselves from head to toe, forbidding them to travel without male escorts and banning teenage girls from attending school.
Under international pressure, the Taliban momentarily buckled, announcing that it would be reopening girls' high schools in the spring. But the movement's hardline factions won, and the decision was quickly reversed, leaving girls in tears at the school gates. According to UNICEF, three million girls are now unable to finish high school, a policy that increases their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.
Human rights in danger
With the best and brightest now gone, it's as if the regime were on a mission to destroy the country it rules. Now in a diplomatic deep freeze, it has seen its central bank reserves, held in US and European accounts, blocked. The country's aid-dependent economy has been starved of billions of dollars in funding, equivalent to 40 per cent of its GDP. The UN and other agencies estimate that 20 million people are going hungry.
As if all this weren't bad enough, terror groups with ambitions for global jihad, such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State, are now flourishing again. The recent CIA killing of Al Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was hailed as a victory for the Biden administration, keen to improve its reputation after the disastrous pullout. But with little on-the-ground intelligence, many believe the group is far from vanquished.
Beneath the grief, the anger, the frustration, there's a genuine sense of puzzlement. To many Afghans, the US's abrupt exit simply doesn't add up. "They came in 2001, and they said: ‘We are here, we will stand by you,'" says Joya. "Why did America leave everything behind? They signed the agreement without the ideas of the Afghan people. They never asked what our views were."
The most baffling foreign policy decision of our times was negotiated jointly by the Trump administration and the Taliban. "When Western countries left, they made a very big mistake. Terror groups are now empowered. They are active and have good support. Human rights, women's rights, all are in danger now," says Joya. "Our rights and freedom were a political game."
"I hope the women will be free again and have their own voice"
For now, all that Joya can do is keep reporting. Armed with a steely resolve, she has battled against the odds to keep her agency alive. Up to the time of our interview, she was working from a tiny hotel room in London, which she shared with a relative. She would rise early to start the day with her journalists in Afghanistan, reporting on issues like corruption, domestic violence, rape and murder. Shortly after our interview, she was finally given a flat, which she plans to transform into a permanent HQ for Rukhshana.
Joya has won plaudits for her work, notably from Time magazine, which recently named her as one of its Women of the Year. But it's clear she would rather none of this had ever happened. Reminiscing about life in Kabul, about meeting friends for tea in the cafes, she remembers how she used to feel. "Your mind was relaxed, physically relaxed," she says.
She longs for that carefree version of herself. It's difficult to have a big dream now, she says. "I hope the women will be free again and have their own voice and their own rights. I hope they stand up again, fighting for their rights." It may seem like an impossible dream, but, as Joya says, "It's the dream we have."