For Laila, to survive the Taliban regime with hope and aspiration is the hardest challenge she has faced thus far, a test for her indomitable motherly love against the regime’s concerted efforts to break her spirit and that of millions of women in Afghanistan.
For years, Laila, a mother of nine in the remote and impoverished Ghor province, had harboured dreams for her three daughters to become doctors. Then, her worst of nightmares came true. The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, banning women from accessing education and employment. That meant she couldn’t work anymore to support her family. Worse, two of her daughters who had just finished high school could not get their diplomas. That means one of the only avenues for her daughters to escape the prison the Taliban have turned their country in, college scholarships, is not available to them.
In the early 2000s, when Afghanistan got rid of the Taliban regime for the first time, Laila lived in Iran. Although she was born there, she had no path to naturalisation or at least basic legal status. Iran’s Islamic Republic, a suppressive theocracy much like the Taliban, banned children from refugee families to attend school when Laila had just finished elementary school. Despite her passion, she was confined at home and got married before turning 18. The dawn of what appeared to be a new age for the country meant Laila and her family could return to a home she had not seen before.
When in early March 2002, she returned to her ancestral village in Lal wa Sarjungal district, one of the poorest areas in Afghanistan’s central highlands, Laila was already parenting two kids. Education burgeoned across the country, especially among Laila’s community, Hazaras in Central Afghanistan, to whom it was a golden era after decades of being persecuted, including by the Taliban. Years of being deprived of an education in Iran had left a mark deep in Laila’s heart. Now that she had the opportunity, she was not going to pass on it. So, she enrolled in a school, defying her husband and the demands of parenting two kids who needed full daycare.
By the time Laila’s two eldest children, Hasan (now 25) and Habiba (now 23), entered school, she had already completed high school and was working as a part-time teacher while pursuing a Teaching Diploma Program. After graduating in two years, she became a full-time teacher at Lal wa Sarjungle Girls’ High School in 2009, affording her financial independence at home. But she was not done. Despite the fact that five of her nine children were approaching school age, Laila was determined to progress further. She decided to enrol in a two-year nursing program at the Lal wa Sarjungle Health Care Centre, offered by the International Assistance Mission (IAM), an organisation focused on building capacity in health and development. Laila’s unwavering commitment to successfully completing the program paid off, leading to a nursing position at the same health center where she received her training.
Laila’s wish was simple: for her daughters to become doctors. But when the Tliban returned to power, that was a wish too big for a woman to have. One of the last lights on the horizon disappeared after the Taliban banned women from university, blocking her daughter who had entered a midwifery program at Kabul University in 2019 to graduate. She had planned for her daughters to get university scholarships abroad. But the Taliban will not issue two of her daughters who have finished high school their high school diplomas, disqualifying them to apply to a university even out of Afghanistan. Even then, it would be a challenge to travel on their own. Two months ago, the Taliban prevented a large group of female students from boarding a flight to Dubai on university scholarships provided by an Arab business tycoon in the UAE.
Laila has clung to the belief that the Taliban’s rule is a fleeting shadow in history, determined not to let her daughters’ precious years be wasted. As she and her husband, a self-employed tailor, raise their five younger sons back in the village, three of her daughters have rented a room in Kabul to learn English, even if no immediately feasible opportunity appears on the horizon. Her eldest son is finishing her medical training as a dentist at Kabul Medical University, one of the few places of higher education partly functional under the Taliban.
