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PHOTOGRAPHS BY KIANA HAYERI
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By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
During the past 20 years, Afghan women have excelled as scholars, athletes, judges, artists, and political leaders. For young Afghan women, full participation in society is the only life they have ever known. This generation of career-focused women now are faced with the threat that everything they've worked for could be taken away under Taliban rule.
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, which studies variables such as employment, education, financial access, safety and political representation, ranks Afghanistan the second worst place in the world to be a woman due to gender-based violence. (Pictured above, students taking English exams in December in Badakhshah province.)
In a 2020 National Geographic story about women's rising political power, one of the first Afghan female mayors, Zarifa Ghafari, told Rania Abouzeid about how she navigates daily threats as she governs in Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak Province and long a Taliban stronghold. But earlier this month, Ghafari, who said she was waiting for the Taliban to come kill her, was among more than 100,000 people who have fled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power and took control of the country.
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