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No government formally recognises the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, partly because its restrictions on female education are the worlds most oppressive. Yet even the Taliban are not radical enough for the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), an offshoot in Afghanistan of the group that established a caliphate in Iraq and Syria in 2014. ISKP propagandists rubbish the Taliban as sell-outs to the West because, among other sins, they meet non-Islamic diplomats and allow unbelievers to supply aid.

During its nine-year existence, ISKP has mainly killed Afghans. The groups global ambitions burst into view on March 22nd, when at least four gunmen killed 139 people at a concert in Moscow. American officials blamed ISKP for the attack; Russia later arrested suspects from Tajikistan. If the charges are proved they will underscore the groups expanding record of strikes beyond Afghanistan. It cultivates a long list of enemies, including America and China. In January its recruits hit a church in Turkey and carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Iran in decades. Two of the suspects spent time in Turkey before travelling to Russia. The Turkish government says that it has made a wave of arrests.

Russia is in ISKPs crosshairs because it maintains an embassy in Kabul and has accepted a Taliban military attach in Moscow. It also provides aid to Syria, where Bashar al-Assads regime helped dismantle ISKPs parent organisation. The attack in Moscow may also reflect ISKPs recruiting among Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. The groups in-house media arm, al-Azaim, distributes content in Central Asian languages. Until his arrest last year, Abu Miskin, a Tajik militant, was among its most active propagandists and high-ranking recruiters, according to the UN.

Estimates of the ISKPs strength vary from fewer than 2,000 to 5,000. Taliban offensives have taken back territory the group once held in Afghanistan. According to Riccardo Valle, director of research at Khorasan Diary, an Islamabad-based group, ISKPs strength these days is its ability to find and connect with small numbers of disaffected people. The current leader is believed to be Shahab al-Muhajir, a 29-year-old of Arab descent. He is rarely heard from, but he can be certain that his disparate organisation will now be at the centre of global attention.

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The Islamic State's branch in Afghanistan is at war with the world - The Economist

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More on the Undercurrents series

This is the last part of a year-long project in which Doug Saunders explores the global migration crisis, and the political and economic forces driving it. Learn more in the Decibel episode below and our companion explainer on this series.

Doug Saunders is The Globe and Mails international affairs columnist. Zia Ur Rehman is a freelance journalist and researcher based in Karachi.

It was 11 p.m. when the men holding assault rifles began pounding on the front gate of Parastoo Mubarizs walled house in Kabul. She turned off all the lights, crept to the back rooms, and told her five children, ages 1 to 14, to lie still and be very silent.

Id been warned by my neighbours the Taliban were coming for me, so we pretended we werent home. We just stayed on the floor for four hours until we were sure theyd left. But I knew theyd be back. So, I packed a bag and at 3:00 in the morning, the neighbours got me a taxi and I left my country forever, without my kids, she told us from the single room where she now lives in hiding in Peshawar, a city in northern Pakistan. It was so painful.

Parastoo Mubariz was a single mother in Kabul when the Taliban took over, and she knew it would not be safe to stay given her former roles in politics. So she went to Pakistan and found refuge in Peshawar. She conceals her face to avoid identification.

Parastoo, then 36, her face uncharacteristically covered to avoid detection, reached Pakistans Torkham border crossing, on the edge of the Khyber Pass, shortly after dawn on that day in early 2022.

It was the start of a two-year odyssey that has taken her along pathways followed by almost seven million Afghans. She became part of one of the worlds largest, and most unresolved, conflict migrations one whose latest disruption appears poised to send tens or hundreds of thousands more people on dangerous journeys westward to Europe and North America.

In the summer of 2021, the United States pulled its military out of Afghanistan and the Taliban abruptly swept into Kabul, seizing control of the government, imposing their strict religious restrictions on daily life and sending an estimated 1.6 million people fleeing in fear.

It was the largest single exodus in 40 years of conflict and extremism in Afghanistan 600,000 Afghans fled south into neighbouring Pakistan, according to United Nations data, and a million into Iran and many of them have wound up effectively stateless, living for years on the road without a clear destination, not welcomed or accepted in any country.

A Taliban fighter guards the queue of refugees at the Afghan side of the Torkham border crossing, which Parastoo had used to enter Pakistan.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press

Parastoo knew she was a target. She had worked in the office of Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistans Western-backed elected president, and in 2019 she attempted a run for elected office in her home province of Takhar a role the Taliban forbade women.

Shortly before the militants seized power, Parastoos husband had died after a long illness, leaving her a single mother just as the Taliban was cracking down on women driving cars and venturing out alone. She was stopped and harassed at checkpoints, and some regime figures recognized her from her political life and threatened her. A month before her escape, she and a dozen other women were seized by the Taliban at a womens-rights protest, locked in a basement overnight and beaten with rifle butts. She, like many other women in public life, had been warned that she could be executed for these transgressions.

So she, like many middle-class Afghan women, fled her country alone. She found a room in Islamabad, and spent those early days in tears of distress. It took three months to persuade her generous neighbours to spirit her five children out of Kabul. Every minute of that was a terrible timethree years ago, this little one was only one year old, she said, holding her toddler.

At a UNHCR camp on the outskirts of Kabul, children receive vitamins after their deportation from Pakistan.WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images

But an escape to Pakistan, she would soon discover, is not really an escape at all.

In 2023, Pakistan turned against the Afghans in its borders. The interim military government launched a program last year to expel all Afghans living in Pakistan without residency papers, and eventually all Afghans and their offspring regardless of documentation, ostensibly on the grounds that local Afghans are associated with a string of terrorist incidents (though refugees have not been connected with the incidents). In October and November of 2023, the government successfully forced more than 450,000 to return or be deported to Afghanistan, and has recently pledged to continue the program once the civilian government resulting from Februarys national elections is fully in place.

During our month on the road in Pakistan, we discovered that Parastoo and hundreds of thousands of Afghans like her have become something of a migratory time bomb, faced with no other choice but to flee, using smugglers or other means, to Europe, North America and other safe destinations. In other words, the Afghan refugee crisis may barely have begun.

Hakim Ullah and one-year-old daughter Sawab Bibi are among the many Afghans living in a mud-walled Pashtun encampment outside Islamabad. A new Pakistani government is settling in after contentious elections, and is likely to continue the deportation policies that last year cut the population of this settlement in half.

Shakila Rasoulis books for children, which portrayed girls as equal to boys, were taught in every Afghan school before the Taliban came. Now, they are among the trove of documents and old photos she took with her family to Rawalpindi.

We are living in a record-breaking moment of conflict migration, and the millions of Afghans streaming through Pakistan have become the most contentious and unsolved part of this huge population.

There are now about 8.2 million Afghans whove been forced to flee their country due to its decades of war, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The majority of them are thought to be in Pakistan, which vies with Turkey as the worlds most refugee-filled country.

As conflict refugees, they are in the company of about six million Ukrainians who cannot return to their invaded country, most living in Central and Western Europe; 6.5 million Syrians who have been forced by dictator Bashir al-Assads crushing of their democratic uprising to flee to other countries (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon); and 1.4 million Sudanese who have escaped violence mainly for other parts of Africa. Together, these four conflicts account for the majority of the worlds 35 million refugees.

Afghanistan is unique in that it has been producing international refugees in great numbers for decades: The first major wave occurred in the early 1980s, when the Soviet Union invaded and about three million Afghans fled to Pakistan, which at first welcomed them as heroic brothers and gave them housing and papers. In the 1990s, almost a million returned home, but the first Taliban takeover in 1996 sent more fleeing, followed by another return in the optimistic early years of the NATO-backed democracy, and then the larger flight after 2021.

We tend to think of conflict migration as a matter of families fleeing danger while the bombs are falling which has certainly been the case, for example, in Ukraine after 2022 and Syria after 2011. But in many major conflicts, the largest movements take place only after the hostilities have ended and the victors sweep into power. That was true of the Second World War and the Vietnam War, and it has become the case in Afghanistan.

But much of the world appears to believe that the Afghanistan war and its associated human dislocations basically ended in 2021. Refugee resettlement and sponsorship by countries that had been involved in the war has declined; countries such as Canada and the United States now have years-long backlogs for the few tens of thousands of Afghan refugees they are accepting (Canada has accepted about 49,000 Afghan refugees since 2021, and the United States about 90,000.)

In Colombia which The Globe visited for an earlier instalment of this series the situation is very different for the Venezuelans who, like the Afghans in Pakistan, have fled hardship into a neighbouring country.Goran Tomasevic/The Globe and Mail

Pakistan does indeed face a nearly unmanageable refugee crisis, on a scale many times larger than any Western country has ever managed. But it might be useful to compare Pakistan with Colombia, which has been deluged with desperate refugees from the country next door.

An earlier article in this series documented the almost seven million Venezuelans who have entered Colombia after an authoritarian regime collapsed the formers economy in 2015. Fearing the vast migration crisis that would erupt across the Americas if Colombia rejected those newcomers, the United States, Canada and other wealthier countries have poured billions into Colombia, which in turn has granted permanent residency, free education and health care to about half of those Venezuelans.

There has been little or no similar support for Pakistan to turn millions of its Afghans into productive citizens. In part, thats because Western governments dont trust Pakistan to use such funds properly. But its also because Pakistans military, which has made migration and borders its exclusive purview, has made it clear that it sees the war as being over and the Taliban regime as a legitimate home for its ethnic Afghans. It has, in effect, tried to hand them back to the Taliban, and thus given millions an incentive to hit the road.

As Parastoo prepared to flee Kabul alone, her neighbour Maria Hamid faced an even more desperate flight, one that was not meant to end in Pakistan.

Maria, 23 at the time, worked for Afghanistans military intelligence service, as did her husband. In 2019, the couple was warned that Taliban spies within their office had identified and targeted them for punishment. They knew a Taliban regime would be fatal.

She needed to find a way out. But she faced two problems. First, her husband was missing: While on assignment in the western city of Herat, days before Kabul fell, he called and told her that he couldnt get home because all the roads were controlled by the Taliban. And that, she told us, stifling tears, is the last call I received from my husband. I still dont know if hes alive or not. Efforts by her family to determine his fate have come to naught.

Second, she was a mother of two boys Osman, 6 then, and Orhan, a months-old nursing baby. She couldnt leave without the baby. But taking the small boy would put them both in danger.

So she left Osman with her parents, concealed her face and body behind a burka for the first time in her life, and, baby in arms, headed west. I went by bus to the border of Iran the Taliban dont check the bus. And I kept myself covered. It was terrifying, but I had a friend who had made it all the way to Turkey, and she knew someone I could pay to take me.

Pakistan was far too dangerous, because the Taliban operated openly there, seemingly with the protection and support of figures in the military. Maria, like many Afghans with few other options, had decided to go dunki a time-worn path, shockingly expensive and horrifically dangerous, that runs through Iran, across the fortified mountain border of Turkey, and then at even more expense and danger, across its northwestern border into Europe. It is one of the oldest human-migration pathways essentially following the original Silk Road and one that Iran, Turkey and the European Union have recently tried to shut down using increasingly severe methods.

The dunki route from Afghanistan to Europe

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP

The dunki route from Afghanistan to Europe

The dunki route from Afghanistan to Europe

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP

The dunki route from Afghanistan to Europe

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP

Some say dunki is a mispronunciation of the English word donkey, others that it comes from a Punjabi word for hopping from place to place. The term, and the infrastructure of smugglers and agents behind it, goes back decades.

Jabbar Khan, a dunki smuggler in Quetta, Pakistan, explained his role in ferrying Afghans (and even more Pakistanis) to the Iranian border. He waits at the Quetta bus station, a gateway for passengers from both countries, and stands with other dunki agents offering trips to the border, typically for less than $100.

Once at the border, he explained, the migrants are handed off to other smugglers who facilitate their passage into Iran and onward to the Turkish border.

The whole dunki trip, if successful, will cost upward of US$3,000, paid to a series of smugglers. Mr. Khan is a minor link, though his crossing is among the most dangerous.

Our goal is to finish the journey in one day, he said. If there are delays, we tie everyone with ropes and keep them in an empty location or trench until we can proceed. If someone escapes it could jeopardize our entire operation.

These refugees on the outskirts of Zaranj city, Afghanistan, attempted the dunki route into Iran in late December.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press

Maria was able to skip this step and enter Iran legally, by getting a temporary visa at the border. Then she met an Iranian dunki agent, paid him US$800 for herself and US$500 for the baby, and boarded a bus with 18 other people.

Upon arriving in Tehran, mother and baby spent 25 days sleeping at a friends house. Then the next agents came and took the group on a daylong drive to a town near the Turkish border. The group was driven into the mountains, and given bottles of water and a cheap cellphone. Watching them from higher in the mountains, the smugglers gave them directions by phone: Left here, follow the river, up that hill, climb that cliff. Baby Orhan cried loudly in the cold, and Maria strained under his weight. A few Afghan teenage boys adventurers whod joined the group took turns carrying him. They waited in a rudimentary concrete bunker, built by smugglers, until nightfall: Hiking through the darkness, their rendezvous was a house near Turkeys border fence, whose Iranian residents had paid off the local border guards to let groups through.

Maria struggled to keep the baby quiet, and the teenage boys, giddy with excitement, chatted loudly too loudly, it turned out. As they approached the house, they were suddenly blinded by police floodlights, then handcuffed and loaded into police vans. Maria and Orhan were held in a freezing police cell for a week, then deported back to western Afghanistan. If you come to the border again, the police told her, we will know what to do with you. Murders and rapes of migrants in Iran and Turkey are commonplace.

Maria teaches Osman and Orhan some of her old military self-defence skills in Peshawar, where they were afraid to leave their apartment building.

Her dunki escape an expensive failure (as many, perhaps the majority, prove to be), Maria was now in considerable danger. She knew that Pakistan was, for now, her only option. She gathered her sons, her teenage sisters Sara and Sana and her mother, and the four women and two children made their way across the border into Pakistan.

We met them in the northern city of Peshawar, where they were living in a two-room flat. They were surviving on rent they collected from her Kabul house, delivered by co-operative neighbours, and fees Sara earns from her online English tutoring. They try not to venture outside if local Pakistani men, never mind the local Taliban or the police, were to discover that theres an all-female refugee household, the consequences could be grim.

Several times the police have come and told us theyd deport us, so weve had to give them money to go away, Maria said. If we stay here in Peshawar, its dangerous because my husbands brother can find us, the Taliban can find us, my son cannot go to school, my little sister cannot continue her education. We want to apply for a job but we cant, we want a better future, but no, its not to be found here. Their refugee applications have gone nowhere, so they still talk about making another dunki trip some day.

They are far from alone. Although the dunki route has become far more difficult and dangerous during the past decade owing to Turkeys construction of a high-security border fence, Europes increased security of its borders and a Turkey-EU cash agreement to prevent migrants from crossing into Greece recent events have made it the only option for many Afghans living in Pakistan.

The decision by Pakistans military regime to deport all Afghans without legal residency appears to have driven many onto the Iran-Turkey route. Turkey reported in 2023 that it was home to about 300,000 undocumented Afghan migrants, many on their way to Europe, and European authorities reported that the overland migration route from Turkey through Greece and Bulgaria had surpassed the Mediterranean route from Africa in traffic, bringing tens of thousands of Afghans into Europe.

The graves of unidentified migrants, mostly from Afghanistan, form a cemetery of the unclaimed in Van, Turkey, in 2021, early in the exodus from the Taliban takeover. Vans location near the Iran-Turkey border makes it a key stopping point in the route to Europe.Bradley Secker/The Globe and Mail

Many of the Afghan families we met in Pakistan said they were preparing for, or at least considering, a dunki trip. Perhaps none had such a longstanding and difficult relationship with the Iran-Turkey pathway as the Bilal family.

We met this family of four in their small single room in an Islamabad apartment building, with a bed in the centre, a tiny makeshift kitchen on the side and two old-fashioned sewing machines and a heap of clothing and fabric filling the back. Farzana Bilal was a teacher at a private girls high school for 20 years, but now she earned a minimal income, just enough to feed the family, using these machines for tailoring and mending, often working until 2 a.m. Her husband took whatever odd cash jobs he found. A sympathetic headteacher neighbour allowed the kids into his school without fees.

This is the worst time in my life, Farzana said. I had my own personality in Afghanistan, people respected me. Now we are in a very bad situation.

When the Bilals fled the Taliban in 2022 and crossed into Pakistan, they assumed theyd stay there long enough to save some money and then head westward together after all, several members of their family had made more or less successful dunki trips to Europe over the past decade. Then they thought they had found a saviour: A business in Lahore, going by the name Usman International, could get the entire family French visas, allowing them to fly to Europe and live legally. The only problem was the price: US$30,000, a ruinous sum even for many Westerners. They called on every branch of their family for loans and wired the money.

And with that, Usman Internationals office, website, phone numbers and e-mail addresses promptly vanished, never to be seen again. The Bilals had fallen victim to one of the many scammers who prey upon Afghan refugees and which Pakistani authorities have no apparent interest in policing because their victims are not considered legitimate residents.

The Bilals still intended to escape via the dunki route, if none of their asylum attempts worked out. But they had no idea how many years it would take to get out of their financial hole and find a place theyre allowed to live.

After Parastoo and her five children settled in a small apartment a friend rented them in Islamabad, they gradually realized that they were surrounded by fellow Afghans, many of them invisible to Pakistani residents.

Islamabad, a centrally-planned capital built in 1967, is a phenomenally expensive place to live by South Asian standards. But as the home to the embassies and refugee agencies required to get asylum, and free from the sort of violent slums the far larger Afghan population of Karachi is forced to live in, it has become the place of exile for much of the former Kabul middle class.

The city now has thriving Afghan markets and neighbourhoods. But because Pakistans military-backed government refused to issue permanent residency certificates or long-term visas to most Afghans who fled after 2021 (and wouldnt renew them for many whod arrived during the previous 40 years), many find it necessary to stay behind closed doors.

Parastoo couldnt apply for jobs, so she relied on the rent she collected from her Kabul house (about $180 a month) and what little money her eldest sons, then aged 13 and 14, earned working in a shop. I went from being a successful woman with a career and a political role, to doing nothing in Islamabad and struggling to raise children, she said. She applied to the United Nations, and to governments including Canadas, for asylum, but even very strong applications were taking years.

And she was better off than many.

Shakila Rasouli comes from a family of educators and human-rights activists who now share a crowded apartment in Rawalpindi.

The Rasouli family were a highly successful intellectual and artistic family from Herat, in the far west of Afghanistan. Shakila was the author of more than 40 successful childrens books once used in every Afghan school, which, owing to their portrayal of girls as equals, are now forbidden. Her sister Soraya ran a prominent civil-rights defence organization called Falah. They used to share a sprawling residential compound full of art and music.

When we met them in February, the sisters, their mother and brother and his wife, and several of their children together a family of 14 people somehow lived in two modest-sized rooms in a back-alley building in Rawalpindi, the chaotic city adjoining Islamabad.

None of them had left those two rooms for more than four months, since Pakistans policy of deportation began in October. Because the Rasoulis lacked papers, and lived in a heavily policed neighbourhood, they had not even set foot in the alleyway since October a trusted neighbour brought them groceries, they didnt dare go to the mosque, and the kids could not go to school. In fact, the smaller children watched enviously, through the lone window, as the neighbourhoods non-Afghan kids walked past on their way to school.

The family devised a bittersweet measure to compensate: Every weekday morning, the adults move over to one of the two rooms; the other is set up as a classroom, with grown-ups taking turns teaching. It at least lets them feel theyre having some kind of school experience, though they know it isnt real, said Somayya, a teenage daughter. After two years, this city feels like a jail, and now were in solitary confinement.

That forced immobility has had a different effect on the family of Ali Zafar and his wife Latifa, who came from Kandahar, fleeing through the western Pakistani city of Quetta. They also rarely dared leave their ground-floor apartment on the other side of Islamabad.

But theyre also hiding for another reason, one that caused them to flee the Taliban very quickly in 2021: They are Christian (Alis family converted to the faith some time in the 20th century). Were living in hiding even our own relatives dont know were in Pakistan, Ali said.

Theyve applied for asylum in a number of Christian-majority countries, including the U.S. and Canada, but have been disappointed by the lack of response. In the meantime, theyve developed their own coping mechanism: On Sundays, they draw their curtains, and welcome a group of local people, usually around 30. In the back room, before a makeshift altar, Ali preaches and ministers to this small flock of Pakistani and Afghan believers.

On Sundays, a group of Afghan and Pakistani worshippers gather to hear Ali Zafar's Christian services in Islamabad. He and his wife, Latifa, are seeking asylum in Christian-majority countries.Courtesy of Latifa Ahmadi

Islamabad, for many of the 2021 refugees, was meant to be a temporary stay. Many expected to find some form of resettlement or asylum after a year or two after all, theyd worked for foreign governments, militaries and agencies that had effectively promised to save them from the Taliban.

The Nazari family live in a high-rise apartment near the edge of the city. Somayya and her husband Rohullah were employed by an American charity, Kabul Small Animal Rescue, that turned Afghan street animals into pets. In 2021, the Taliban told it to leave, and the organizations founder, Charlotte Maxwell-Jones, vowed to get all her staff and families, about 125 people, out of the country.

Very few have got out: Some, like the Nazaris, were exiled to Pakistan or other nearby countries; some tried to stay, and at least one was stabbed to death in Kabul. In 2022, Ms. Maxwell-Jones organized a well-publicized, risky rescue mission to get the pets out. As part of that mission, more than 300 dogs and cats were flown to Vancouver to be rescued.

But former staff, such as the Nazari family, have been harder to rescue. The United States has been notoriously slow and picky in processing asylum applications, and Canada has still-unresolved backlogs that have put some legitimate and accepted Afghan refugees in danger of deportation. The animal-rescue charity has been paying the rent and some living costs for staff stranded in Pakistan, including the Nazaris, but it is not enough. Unable to work legally, they run a small business from their apartment, packing school lunches for the buildings residents. Our entire lives are on hold, and we cant work or study, said Somayya. And the worst part is we have no idea how long we will have to be here.

Ghulam Hakim, the elder of the Afghan settlement outside Islamabad, says many people here fled Afghanistan for economic reasons, not because they are ideologically opposed to the Taliban.

A different form of Afghan exile is concealed just beyond the city limits of Islamabad, in a mud-walled enclave, hidden by a grassy hill on the edge of a garbage dump. Inside are a couple hundred people, many of them children, dressed in the colourful dress of Pashtun nomads, and living as they might have in Kandahar a century ago: a warren of mud-and-straw houses, food cooked on outdoor wood fires, and little electricity or technology.

Ghulam Hakim, at 55 the elder of this community, first came to this place as a teenager in the early 1980s, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For decades, he and his family moved back and forth seasonally, farming in Afghanistan and doing rudimentary jobs and selling things in Pakistan during the winter. There was no difference between the countries until after 2001, you could cross the border without questions, he recalled. And Pakistanis treated us like brothers, not like today.

Ghulam now has seven children and eight grandchildren living in the encampment. According to Pakistans constitution, any offspring born on Pakistani soil should be legal citizens but governments have never observed that law. Instead, police began harassing them in October, and about a third of the encampments residents have returned to Afghanistan to avoid deportation.

Neither he nor any of his neighbours have any problem with the Taliban; they share the conservative religious beliefs and Pashtun customs. Their reason for exile, Ghulam said, is purely economic: Even garbage picking is more lucrative than farming in Kandahar today. We really cant go back there, we couldnt eat. It would take a year to make as much money in Kandahar as we do here in a month.

In the months after she arrived in Islamabad and rescued her five children from Kabul, Parastoos life was difficult. By early 2023 it had became impossible. The 20-year Afghan war had officially ended, but last year the war came looking for her.

Shopkeepers told her a Pashtun-looking man was going around showing an image of her passport on his phone. Then she started getting calls and texts, from Afghan country codes, including photos of her at womens-rights protests in Islamabad, accompanied by death threats: They said, you did these things in Afghanistan, now you have gone to Pakistan and you do the same thing, the penalty for this is to be stoned to death. People active in Kabul told her the threats were real, as Taliban figures had targeted her.

She shut down all her social-media accounts, and changed the name she uses in public. Then she packed her bags, and loaded her children in a taxi to the train station. They were going south.

She was far from alone. For a great many Afghans, Pakistan has proved not to be a safe haven from conflict and retribution.

Alvira Azad, 31, lives in a medical students dormitory in Rawalpindi. For more than a year she did not leave the compound, which is guarded around the clock by men carrying Kalashnikov rifles and checking ID. Even going out to buy food, she discovered last year, could be deadly.

In 2016, she won admission to a well-regarded medical school in Pakistan. Her fathers conservative Pashtun family did not approve of a woman leaving on her own or studying medicine, but in those years they had little control. On her return to Afghanistan, they tried to force her to marry a cousin. Her brother helped her escape back to Pakistan.

But the Taliban takeover in 2021 meant that her fathers family now had the ruling regime behind them. The cousin had become an officer in the Taliban, and made her insubordination an official issue. She started receiving threats. Then, in early 2023, she was shopping at the bazaar when three men grabbed her and pulled her into a dark corner. They punched her face, violently breaking her nose, while whispering angry claims about her disloyalty. She was saved from worse when passersby saw her and pulled them away, though police would not take action. She spent two days in the hospital and still bears the scars. Im very restricted here I can only teach medical students online, and I cannot become a practitioner as long as I live within reach of the Taliban, she said.

Zohra Wahidi Akhatari lives in Rawalpindi with her husband, Wahid Ahmad Akhtari, and their children as she continues advocating for women, which got her arrested and tortured by the Taliban.

Many of those living in fear of Taliban reprisals became targets because they worked for Western governments and agencies that claimed to empower and protect women in Afghanistan. Now there is a palpable anger that they are not being extended the same sort of protection.

A lot of organizations said we are here to support women, we are here to help them. But all of them were just lying, because I see that nobody has responded, said Zohra Wahidi Akhtari, who worked as a womens voice for a number of organizations in the 2010s, and as a teacher of girls and a womens-rights activist.

The Taliban takeover brutalized her. Her father and brother, in the military, were shot to death. She tried to escape with her family by going to Baghram Airport on Aug. 26, 2021; the suicide bombing that chaotic day killed her mother, along with at least 182 other people, and forced her to give up hope of an asylum flight. A month later she was arrested by the Taliban, held in a cell for weeks and tortured with electric shocks to the face, which remains partly paralyzed. She was able to escape with her five children in 2022, and found she still had to hide from Taliban agents in Pakistan. She was promised asylum by UN agencies and governments, but two years later has heard nothing.

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Opinion: The Afghan refugee crisis is a migratory time bomb that may soon go off - The Globe and Mail

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A human rights calamity is unfolding in Afghanistan. Since retaking power in mid-2021, the Taliban have implemented more extreme policies against women than any other regime in the world. Taliban leaders have issued over 90 edicts limiting womens rights: they have banned women and girls from attending university or school beyond the sixth grade, restricted their access to health care, prohibited them from leaving home without a male guardian, and revoked many of their social and legal protections. Every new restriction on Afghan women strengthens the Talibans dictatorial grip on the entire Afghan population and feeds extremism in a society already occupied by dozens of terrorist groups. Although the Taliban are fighting the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), they allow some 20 other terrorist groups to operate freely in Afghan territory.

Yet even though Afghanistan is the only country in the world that prohibits womens education, some analysts are urging the United States to normalize ties with the Taliban, including by reopening a U.S. embassy in the country. These proponents argue that by doing so, Washington would improve its ability to monitor assistance programs and engage with Taliban leaders in the country, including to press them to moderate their policies. But taking steps to normalize relations with the Taliban before their leaders halt their systematic persecution of women would be a gross betrayal of the millions of women and girls whose lives the United States helped to transform over two decades. During the Talibans previous stint in power, from 1996 to 2001, they closed schools to girls, forbade women to work, and targeted women with extreme forms of punishment, including public floggings and executions.

From 2002 to 2021, however, during the U.S.-led NATO mission to stabilize Afghanistan, Afghan women served as cabinet ministers, ambassadors, parliamentarians, diplomats, and journalists, reflecting historic levels of involvement in society. It is fair to say that empowering women represents the best work the United States did in Afghanistan and its most positive legacy. In early 2021, months before the U.S. military withdrawal and the Talibans takeover, 2.5 million Afghan girls were attending primary school, and 27 percent of the seats in the Afghan parliament were held by women.

Normalizing relations with the Taliban before they reverse their anti-women policies would amount to pretending as if those two decades of progress never happened. Moreover, allowing the Taliban to crush the lives of half the countrys population would make a joke of American claims of defending human rights worldwide. It would also reveal Washingtons disinterest in adhering to its own legislation: the 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act codified the United States commitment to gender equity and inclusion in security, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, making gender equity an integral part of U.S. foreign policy. The UN is trying to maintain a firm line with the Taliban: ahead of a February UN-sponsored meeting of Afghan Special Representatives from 25 different countries in Doha, the Taliban demanded that all Afghan civil society leaders be disinvited. UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres was right not to give in to this demand.

But the United States must more fully support UN efforts to promote an inclusive political dialogue that includes Afghan civil society leaders and that places womens rights at its center. Washington must also expand human rights sanctions against Taliban leaders and work with the UN to officially designate more of them as terrorists. Finally, Washington must sustain its refusal to extend diplomatic recognition to the Taliban regime until it reverses its persecution of women. Washington must not give the Talibans repression of women a blank checkespecially because the deepening persecution of women will feed other kinds of extremism.

When the Taliban returned to power after the August 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, their leaders made pledges that they would govern the country differently from the way they did previously by allowing women to work and study. They closed Afghanistans schools to girls immediately after they took power but promised to reopen them. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, told reporters that women would be permitted to participate in society within the bounds of Islamic law, adding that when it comes to experience, maturity, and vision, there is a huge difference between todays Taliban leaders compared to 20 years ago.

In reality, there is no difference when it comes to the treatment of women. Over the past two and a half years, the Taliban have gradually stripped women and girls of their rights, tightened control over their lives, and even sanctioned violence against them. The Taliban started their campaign against women in September 2021 by disbanding the Ministry of Womens Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, whose mandate is to ensure that Afghans follow the new regimes strict interpretation of Islam. Shortly after that, the Taliban issued orders requiring all professional women to quit their jobs, and in December 2021, they forbade women to travel abroad without a male relative. When Afghan schools were reopened to girls in March 2022, only those 12 years old and younger were allowed to return. Later that year, the Taliban further revealed their true intentions toward women when they announced that women would no longer be permitted to attend university or to work for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The Taliban are also increasingly encouraging violence against women, both in word and in deed. Official public floggings of women as well as men have become commonplace for what the Taliban deem moral crimes, such as adultery, theft, or running away from home. In May 2023, the head of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Kandahar, Mawlawi Abdulhai Omar, instructed his provinces leaders to ban women from going to cemeteries and health centers on the pretext that women visitors and patients were inappropriately wearing makeup or pretending to be ill.

Omar told the provincial leaders to arrest and punish fathers and brothers for not correcting these transgressions in their daughters and sisters. In a culture that already faces the scourge of honor killings, such decrees seem likely to increase the prevalence of domestic violence. In cities and rural areas today in Afghanistan, women cannot walk freely on the streets. Millions of girls cannot receive an education, and hundreds of thousands of women cannot earn an income to help support their families. An increasing number of girls are being forced into marriage, often with much older men, and suicide rates among female Afghans are on the rise as they lose hope for their future.

During a recent trip to Pakistan and Qatar, senior government interlocutors told one of us that the Taliban were unlikely to change their anti-women policies. Nonetheless, the United States must take a principled stand for Afghan women and girls, regardless of the Talibans response. It has room to do so, as evidenced by a few strong positions it has taken already. In early December, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, and the head of Afghanistans Academy of Sciences, Sheikh Fariduddin Mahmood; both men are widely believed to be behind the ban on girls secondary education.

Aside from limited sanctions, however, the United States has been largely reluctant to actively penalize the Taliban for their persecution of women. Instead, the U.S. government has focused on seeking innovative ways to support Afghan women and girls. In September 2022, for example, the State Department launched the Alliance for Afghan Womens Economic Resilience, a public-private partnership between the State Department and Boston University that encourages collaborations between leading Afghan women and the U.S. private sector, civil society, and academia to support Afghan womens access to online education and employment.

While AWER is a laudable effort and sends the message to Afghan women that the world has not completely forgotten about them, it is not enough. Women and girls in Afghanistan may find creative ways to build their skills and learn virtually, but unless the Taliban reverse their discriminatory policies, women will be unable to deploy these skills in Afghan society. In addition to initiatives like AWER, Washington and like-minded governments must put more penalties on the Taliban, such as expanding sanctions on their leaders and curbing those leaders ability to travel.

Some commentators argue that Taliban leaders should be encouraged to travel abroad and attend international conferences, despite their harsh policies against women, on the theory that international exposure will soften their policies. But this argument increasingly appears flawed. Taliban leaders have been able to travel and meet frequently with international representatives over the past two and a half years, yet their policies toward women and girls keep getting worse.

One way that the United States can support the women of Afghanistan is to lead the fight to formally label the Talibans policies as gender apartheid. The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court introduced apartheid as a crime for which governments worldwide can be punished. Historically, this crimedescribed by the ICC as inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing themrefers to discrimination along racial lines. But UN experts are now pushing for a specific recognition of gender apartheid in the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention, which will be discussed in April in the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly. If gender apartheid is included, designating the Talibans policies as a form of gender apartheid would prompt their classification as a crime against humanity.

In the case of the Talibans policies, the designation would be remarkably apt. Banning a group of peopledefined by an immutable physical characteristicfrom accessing education, employment, and health care; restricting their travel unless they are accompanied by a guardian; imposing special legal punishments on them; and systematically excluding them from public spaces such as gyms and beauty salons is precisely what the anti-Black South African apartheid regime did from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Applying the term to the Talibans policies and codifying it as an international crime would also be enormously valuable in practice. It would help galvanize international leaders and NGOs to take the issue more seriously and create a legal obligation to address the systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan.

The gender apartheid designation would also supplement other UN actions aimed at supporting women and girls in Afghanistan. In December 2023, UN Security Council Resolution 2721 called for the establishment of a UN Envoy to Afghanistan. The resolution stipulates that this envoy should have experience with human rights and gender issues. China and Russia abstained from the vote, however, and called on the UN to consult with the Taliban before appointing such an envoy. By establishing a role for an envoy and convening the meeting of Afghan Special Representatives in Doha, the UN has begun directing its attention to the plight of Afghan women. But Beijings and Moscows disregard for the rights of Afghan women will make this effort a slow, uphill battle.

The UNs accelerating efforts deserve strong U.S. support. The United States can also increase its engagement with Afghan opposition leaders to show the Taliban that they are not the only game in town. The Taliban took power through force, and they have no real claim to political legitimacy. There are other Afghan voices that can justifiably claim to represent the will of the Afghan people, even if they are currently in exile.

Because the Taliban are likely to remain in power in the near term, complete disengagement is not the solution. But the United States must show greater willingness to defend Afghan women and stand up for human rights. Aside from being the right thing to do, supporting Afghan women will also help undermine extremist trends in the country, a necessary step given the plethora of terrorist groups that operate in Afghanistanterrorist groups that appear to be flourishing. The latest UN Sanctions Monitoring Report, released in January 2024, notes that al Qaeda has established eight new training camps in Afghanistan. ISIS-K just claimed responsibility for the March 23 attack in Moscow that killed over 130 people, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which operates within Afghanistan and has been responsible for a rising number of attacks on Pakistani civilians and security personnel, is also gaining strength.

The more the Taliban suppress womens involvement in society, the greater the likelihood that extremist ideologies will proliferate, driving recruitment for terrorist groups. The Taliban are opening new religious schools and implementing new curricula in public schools that teach young men about its radical form of Islam, thus breeding a new generation of extremists. The best way to reverse such developments is for the United States to aid the international community in its fight to keep women and girls in school and maintain their agency in society.

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Don't Betray the Women of Afghanistan - Foreign Affairs Magazine

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She secretly educated herself to escape Afghanistan. Now, she's working to help women still there  NBC News

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She secretly educated herself to escape Afghanistan. Now, she's working to help women still there - NBC News

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Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Talibans illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide.

An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Talibans operations, as they loot Afghanistans natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.

The report was completed by a private, London-based threat analysis firm whose directors did not want to be identified. A copy was provided to Foreign Policy and its findings verified by independent sources. It is based on research conducted inside Afghanistan in recent months and includes a list of senior al Qaeda operatives and the roles they play in the Talibans administration.

To facilitate its ambitions, al Qaeda is raking in tens of millions of dollars a week from gold mines in Afghanistans northern Badakhshan and Takhar provinces that employ tens of thousands of workers and are protected by warlords friendly to the Taliban, the report says. The money represents a 25 percent share in proceeds from gold and gem mines; 11 gold mines are geolocated in the report. The money is shared with al Qaeda by the two Taliban factions: Sirajuddin Haqqanis Kabul faction and Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzadas Kandahar faction, suggesting both leaders, widely regarded as archrivals, see a cozy relationship with al Qaeda as furthering their own interests as well as helping to entrench the groups overall power.

The Talibans monthly take from the gold mines tops $25 million, though this money does not appear in their official budget, the report says. Quoting on-the-ground sources, it says the money goes directly into the pockets of top-ranking Taliban officials and their personal networks. Since the mines began operating in early 2022, al Qaedas share has totaled $194.4 million, it says.

After regaining power in August 2021, the Taliban integrated a large number of listed terrorist groups that fought alongside them against the U.S.-supported Afghan republic. The Biden administration, however, has persistently denied that al Qaeda has reconstituted in Afghanistan or even that al Qaeda and the Taliban have maintained their long, close relationship.

Those denials ring hollow as evidence piles up that the Taliban and al Qaeda are as close as ever. The U.N. Security Council and the U.S. Congress-mandated Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) have consistently reported on the Talibans symbiotic relationship with dozens of banned terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda.

Few experts believed Taliban leaders assurances, during negotiations with former U.S. President Donald Trump that led to the ignominious U.S. retreat, that the groups relationship with al Qaeda was over; bin Ladens vision of a global caliphate based in Afghanistan was a guiding principle of the war that returned the Taliban regime, which one Western official in Kabul said differs only from the previous regime in 1996-2001 in that they are even better at repression.

The historic relationship hit global headlines when bin Ladens successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed on July 31, 2022, in a U.S. drone strike as he stood by the window of a Kabul villa. The property was linked to Haqqani, the head of the largely autonomous Haqqani network and a member of al Qaedas leadership structure. He is also a deputy head of the Taliban and its interior minister, overseeing security. He is believed to harbor ambitions for the top job of supreme leader, with aspirations to become caliph.

Now that they can operate with impunity, the reports says, the Taliban are once again providing al Qaeda commanders and operatives with everything they need, from weapons to wives, housing, passports, and access to the vast smuggling network built up over decades to facilitate the heroin empire that bankrolled the Talibans war.

The routes have been repurposed for lower-cost, higher-return methamphetamine, weapons, cash, gold, and other contraband. Militants from Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and the Palestinian territories also circulate through the al Qaeda training camps that have been revived since the Taliban takeover. Security is provided by the Talibans General Directorate of Intelligence.

The report includes a list of al Qaeda commanders, some of whom were bin Ladens lieutenants when he was living in Afghanistan while planning the attacks on the United States. Those atrocities precipitated the U.S.-led invasion that drove him, and the Taliban leadership, into Pakistan, where they were sheltered, funded, and armed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

The reports findings demonstrate that, as expected, the Taliban leadership continues to be willing to protect not only the leadership of al Qaeda but also fighters, including foreign terrorist fighters from a long list of al Qaeda affiliates, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Berlin- and New York-based Counter Extremism Project and an expert on terrorism. It is clear that the Taliban have never changed their stance toward international terrorism and, in particular, al Qaeda.

Many analysts believe President Joe Bidens decision to stick to Trumps withdrawal deal led to Afghanistan becoming an incubator of extremism and terrorism. Leaders of neighboring and regional states, including Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and countries in Central Asia, have expressed concern about the threat posed by the Talibans transnational ambitions. U.N. figures, including Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett, have repeatedly called out Taliban suppression of rights and freedoms and the imprisonment and killing of perceived opponents.

In February, the George W. Bush Institute released the first report in its three-part Captured State series titled Corruption and Kleptocracy in Afghanistan Under the Taliban, which recommends action by the United States and the U.N. to rein in Taliban excesses. It calls on the United States and allies to pressure foreign enablers of Taliban corruption and reputation laundering to stop facilitating corrupt economic trading activities, illicit trafficking, and moving and stashing personal wealth outside Afghanistan.

Pointedly, it says the U.N. and other aid organizations should demand greater accountability for how aid is spent and distributed and urges international donors to support civil society, which has been decimated by the Taliban.

Its a reference to the billions of dollars in aid that have been sent to Afghanistan since the republic collapsedincluding, controversially, $40 million in cash each week, which has helped keep the local currency stable despite economic implosion. The United States is the biggest supporter, funneling more than $2.5 billion to the country from October 2021 to September 2023, SIGAR said. Foreign Policy has reported extensively on the Talibans systematic pilfering of foreign humanitarian aid for redistribution to supporters, which has exacerbated profound poverty.

The Bush Institute paper is one of the few comprehensive studies of the impact of the Talibans return to power to publicly call for the group to face consequences for its actions. It suggests, for instance, the enforcement of international travel bans on Taliban leaders, which are easily and often flouted.

Recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan would reinforce the Talibans claim to power and strengthen their position by giving them even greater access to cold, hard cash, the report says, a warning that comes amid growing fears that the United States could be preparing to reopen its Kabul embassy, which the Taliban would see as tacit recognition.

By capturing the Afghan state, the Taliban have significantly upgraded their access to resources, the Bush Institute argues, putting the group in the perfect position now to loot it for their own individual gain.

That plundered resource wealth also appears to be boosting the coffers of like-minded groups. The London firms unpublished report identifies 14 al Qaeda affiliatesmost of them listed by the U.N. Security Councils Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Teamthat are directly benefiting from the mining proceeds. They include seven inside Afghanistan (among them, the anti-China East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the anti-Tajikistan Jamaat Ansarullah, and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which is fighting the Pakistani state) and seven operating elsewhere: al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda in Yemen, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in Syria, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, al Qaeda in the Mahgreb, and al-Shabab, largely active in East Africa.

For Western governments that might be pondering a closer relationship with the Taliban regime or even diplomatic recognition, Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project sounded a note of warning. The Taliban, he said, are not a viable counterterrorism partner, even on a tactical level. Instead, the group remains one of the prime sponsors of terrorism worldwide.

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