Five years is a short period in a country’s history. For a child, it’s a lifetime. That’s the framing more than two dozen UN human rights experts used in a joint statement marking five years since the Taliban’s return to power. For Afghan women and girls, it’s the clearest measure of what’s been lost – a lifetime. A girl finishing sixth grade when the education ban began has now turned 18 without ever seeing a classroom again. She may also have been forced into marriage. (Read more about the increase in child marriage here, here, and here.)
Today, 56 UN member states also separately called on the Taliban to reverse all its “discriminatory decrees and policies.”
The experts warn that some states are increasingly tempted to normalize relations with the Taliban, despite no change on the ground. Five years of evidence show the opposite: the Taliban are tightening their grip on power at any cost to the Afghan people, not loosening it. Normalizing “a regime that systematically persecutes more than half of its population,” they write, “does not promote change; it legitimizes oppression.”
Over five years, the Taliban have issued a growing number of edicts reaching into nearly every corner of public and private life, engineering a society built on “ideological conformity, fear, and exclusion.” They reaffirm a position first stated last year. This system of gender discrimination meets the legal threshold of a crime against humanity, persecution on grounds of gender, now widely called gender apartheid. (Read more on gender apartheid here.)
A Deepening Crisis
Five years on, the crisis extends beyond grave human rights violations. Afghanistan also faces profound humanitarian, economic, and security challenges.
Every restriction from the past five years remains in full force. Girls are still banned from secondary education. Women remain excluded from most jobs, from moving freely without a male guardian, from healthcare, courts, sport, cultural life, and public affairs. (See full list of edicts here.)
Protest is banned outright. In June 2026, at least 30 women and girls were jailed in Herat for not following the Taliban’s dress code. When residents protested peacefully, security forces opened fire, killing two people, including a boy, and arrested still more.
Corporal and capital punishment have escalated sharply. In 2025 alone, the Taliban’s de facto Supreme Court reported over 1,110 floggings, including at least 170 women, more than every previous year of Taliban rule combined, and the pace has continued into 2026. At least 12 men have been publicly executed since August 2021.
While women and girls bear the heaviest weight, the same logic of enforced conformity reaches anyone who opposes the Taliban’s singular vision of society: religious minorities (Shia, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, Christian), LGBT+ Afghans, people with disabilities pushed out of education and work, and journalists, judges, and former officials punished for who they were before 2021. Some cases amounting to enforced disappearance.
Hunger is Daily Life for Millions
Hunger is its own emergency in Afghanistan. More than 17 million people, out of a population of 40 million, faced acute food insecurity this past winter. Nearly 4 million children are acutely malnourished, roughly a million severely enough to need hospital treatment. With aid reaching barely 2.7% of the population, hunger isn’t a risk; it’s daily life. Women-headed households, already cut off from movement and the workforce, have the least access to what assistance remains.
What the Taliban Have Failed to Erase and Control
Of everything the Taliban have taken from the Afghan people and women and girls in particular, Afghan women have not lost their hope for a better future. They remain hopeful and call for the support and solidarity of allies, feminists, and all those who believe in equality, human rights, and dignity for all. They have not surrendered. (Read some of their quotes here. Page takes you to Instagram.)
Beyond Afghanistan’s borders, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s two most senior leaders, and a new mechanism is now preserving evidence of their crimes for future accountability. Fourteen countries have voiced support for codifying gender apartheid, and four, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany, are pursuing accountability over Afghanistan’s CEDAW violations.
The question now is whether the world stands with Afghan women and girls, or lets “them down again.”
Source: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR), August 13, 2026 and U.N. Security Council, August 14, 2026.