'We will return to the same dark days': Afghan women fear losing freedoms now that the Taliban have retaken power

“I am sitting here waiting for them to come,” said Zarifa Ghafari, mayor of Maidan Shar, one of the few Afghan cities with women in charge. “There is no one to help me or my family. I'm just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and they will kill me. I can't leave my family. And where would I go anyway?

Ghafari told a British media outlet that he fled the country on Sunday as the Taliban began, city by city, to take control of this Central Asian country following the chaotic withdrawal of US military troops after 20 years of fighting the extremists. The dreams and ambitions of thousands of Afghan women went to the ground in a matter of days. In its place now is terror and helplessness.

Afghanistan has been at war for decades, even before the United States entered the country to fight Taliban and extremist forces since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

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For the previous five years, the fundamentalist group ruled the country.

During that time, he forbade girls to get an education and women the right to work, even refusing to let them leave their homes without a male relative to accompany them. The Taliban also carried out public executions, cut off the hands of thieves and stoned women accused of adultery.

Ghafari, 27, has been Afghanistan's youngest mayor since 2018 and the first woman to hold the post in the conservative city of Maidan Shar in Wardak province. As the Taliban began to resurface, Ella Ghafari was put in charge of the welfare of soldiers and civilians wounded in terror attacks, at the Ministry of Defense in Kabul, the capital.

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There have been no confirmed reports of measures as extreme as what was happening in the 1990s in areas recently seized by the Taliban. But some militants were reported to have seized several houses and set fire to at least one school.

At a park in Kabul that has been turned into a shelter for displaced people since last week, families told The Associated Press on Friday that girls returning home to the northern province of Takhar were rounded up and tied up for wearing "revealing sandals"

The Taliban's chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, promised on Sunday that they would protect the lives of the women and their opponents.

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Mujahid said the fighters "will be on standby at all entrances to Kabul until a peaceful and satisfactory transfer of power is agreed." In a separate statement to NBC News, sister network of Noticias Telemundo, a Taliban spokesman said that fighters entering Kabul were unarmed on instructions from high command.

The advance of the Taliban and the collapse of the government sent thousands of civilians fleeing their homes and seeking refuge, both from the fighting and from the return of the ultra-conservative Islamist regime.

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Zahra, a 26-year-old resident of Herat, the country's third-largest city, had tears in her eyes as she considered that she might not be able to go back to work, she told the AP; that her 12-year-old sister will no longer be able to go to school (she "loves to learn," she said); that her older brother will not be able to play soccer; or that she won't be able to play the guitar freely again.

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Zahra stopped going to the office and started working from home nearly a month ago as militants closed in on Herat. But on Thursday, the Taliban broke through the city's defense lines and she has been unable to work ever since.

Marianne O'Grady, deputy director of CARE International in Kabul, said the gains made by women in the past two decades have been dramatic. But she added that she doesn't see how things could go back to the way they were, even if the Taliban regain power.

"You can't de-educate millions of people," she told the AP. If women "are locked up and can't get out, at least now they can educate their cousins ​​and neighbors and their own daughters in a way that was impossible 25 years ago."

Yet the sense of terror is pervasive, especially among women, as Taliban forces gain more ground every day.

"I feel like we are like a bird that makes a nest to survive and spends all its time building it, but then suddenly and helplessly watches others destroy it," Zarmina Kakar, an activist for the rights of 26-year-old women in Kabul.

Kakar was one year old when the Taliban first entered Kabul in 1996, and she recalled a time when her mother took her out for ice cream when the Taliban ruled. Her mother was flogged by a Taliban fighter for exposing her face for a couple of minutes.

“Today, again, I feel that if the Taliban come to power, we will go back to the same dark days,” she said.

With information from The Associated Press and NBC News.