A Secret School for Girls
Inside the clandestine network of classrooms defying the Taliban in Afghanistan
By Jessie Williams
A group of teenage girls and young women gather in a nondescript room with pale walls, chatting and laughing. They have just finished their classes for the week and are about to head home. But they must leave one by one, so as not to draw any attention. If someone asks them where they have been, they say they were visiting the doctor. If they think someone might be on to them, the teachers move their classes to another person’s house. They leave their books at home. They must not be caught.
These girls live in Afghanistan, where education for girls beyond sixth grade is banned by the Taliban. They attend an underground girls’ school – one of five an Afghan NGO quietly runs across the country, with 28 teachers in different provinces providing free education to around 1,000 students, ranging in age from 13 to 45.
“I was very unhappy when the Taliban closed my school,” says Ada*, 15, who was in eighth grade when the Taliban returned to power on a hot summer day in 2021, following the withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces. “I had depression.” The secret school she attends opened in the months afterward. “I feel better [now],” she says. “When I see the teachers and girls, I have power.”
As a new school year begins in Afghanistan, more than 2.2 million girls are currently out of school. But some of them are defying the ban. Over the past few years, classrooms have emerged in the shadows—cropping up in basements, living rooms and bedrooms around the country, away from the prying eyes of the Taliban, who have informants to catch people violating their strict codes. The schools use certain tactics to evade those informants, including staggering the timing of classes, so that some girls attend in the afternoon and some in the evening. If the girls think they’re being followed, they change their route. Madrassas, or religious schools, are still allowed, so if they are caught, they say they were going there.
The schools run by the NGO, which we can’t name for safety reasons, started through a network of trusted people in different communities. They cost about $60,000 to run each year, which a grant from the Frontline Women’s Fund, an initiative that supports women’s rights activists around the world, helps cover. One class was established and then another, and before long the network had blossomed into a web of clandestine schools, turning girls into what the Taliban fears most: educated women. “An educated woman changes the world,” says Laleh, 25, who teaches English at one of the schools. “An educated mother nurtures, trains, educates her kid. The kid changes the society.”
The Meteor spoke to the teachers and students over Zoom on the condition that we hide their identities. The stakes are high; if the Taliban ever found out about the schools, the teachers would be sent to prison, while the girls themselves could also face imprisonment and beatings. Despite the risks, the educators continue to teach. “When I was a girl, I studied chemistry. My father said ‘It's not safe to study.’ But I wanted to have a voice,” says Laleh. “When I teach the girls, they have the vocabulary to talk. It empowers me. When they learn, I think that I have done something in the world, that I didn't live a worthless life.”
Without education, she says, “our people don't even know how they should live and what their rights are…When half of our society is paralyzed, how can our country move forward?”
Since returning to power the Taliban has systematically eroded women’s and girls’ rights. Education for girls over sixth grade was the first to go, followed by barring women from university and nearly all forms of employment, then prohibiting them from playing sports, and even leaving the house without being completely covered and accompanied by a mahram or male guardian. The Taliban’s latest decree permits men to beat their wives as long as they don’t break any bones or leave open wounds.
The UN says that Afghan women are facing the most severe women’s rights crisis in the world, with many activists and human rights organizations calling it “gender apartheid”—a term meaning the systemic oppression, discrimination, and segregation of a specific group based on gender.
In January 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the supreme leader and chief justice of the Taliban, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls. But nothing has been done to enforce the warrants. Even worse, the international community has begun to accept and normalize the Taliban as the de facto government, despite its draconian policies—like establishing embassies in Kabul, welcoming diplomats appointed by the Taliban, and inviting them to international summits.
Meanwhile, cuts to foreign aid budgets have meant dwindling humanitarian support for Afghanistan, and while the UN has continued its operations in the country, it faces major challenges—the main one being the ban on Afghan women entering UN premises, along with a 50 percent funding gap for UN work, which makes it difficult to provide services directly to women at a time when they desperately need it.
"Maybe they will arrest me and I go to jail. But I have to do this.”
Many Afghan women feel like the world has forgotten about them. Mariam, the 30-year-old executive director of the NGO that runs the schools, was a head teacher before the Taliban swept through the country. She says the international community should be doing more. “For five years girls and women can't go to school. It’s terrible. But nobody is doing anything,” she says. “Why aren’t the UN with us?”
Mariam says there are many women who are struggling financially now that they cannot work, and girls are being forced into early marriages. At the same time, recent clashes with Pakistan and war in neighboring Iran are exacerbating the already dire economic crisis.
For these girls, the school offers a glimmer of hope in an increasingly dark world, giving them the chance to forge their own futures. Bahar, a 19-year-old with a wide smile, was in 10th grade when the Taliban closed the schools. “When I come here I feel so excited,” she says, giggling. “I feel complete and confident.” Her favorite subjects are English and math, and one day she hopes to become a psychologist. “Education is very important to me. When girls use education, they can help their family.”
All of the girls’ families are supportive of them attending the classes, despite the dangers. “I feel happy because I improve my skills in this school,” says one student, Lama, 18. She especially loves art because it allows her to express her feelings, but wants to be a doctor when she’s older. “I want to help my people, always.”
Rehan, 21, a math teacher, says when she was her students’ age, “I had these opportunities as a student and I felt great. They should become what they want; I always teach them to become stronger.” Many of her students are vulnerable, she says, and so she makes sure to focus on their mental health. “When I come to class I ask them, ‘How was your day? How are you?’ Sometimes many of them don't have a good situation at home. First, I make sure they are safe, that they don't have any mental problems. Then I start to teach what I planned. I like to make the class a safer place for them.”
As the students and teachers talk, it becomes clear: These are much more than just schools. They also seem to be sanctuaries for women and girls to connect, laugh, and dream with friends. They are like a family, and Mariam, the head of the NGO, is the matriarch. She calls the students “my daughters” and sees supporting them as her responsibility. “It's a very big challenge,” she says. “We are afraid [of the Taliban finding out]. Maybe they will arrest me and I go to jail. But I have to do this.”
Despite the constant fear, they all still try to find joy – even if it’s fleeting. They dance and sing together when no one is looking. These girls are growing hope in the shadows; they’re creating cracks of light streaming through the darkness. “Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we cry,” says Mariam. “Maybe when the Taliban go, we will get our rights [back]. We want a new generation to feel peace.”
*All names in the piece have been changed to protect the subjects’ identity.
Jessie Williams is a freelance journalist focused on international affairs, humanitarian issues, and women’s rights, with work published in The Guardian, TIME Magazine, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, and more. She has reported from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Ukraine, among other places.
She Fled Fear—and Found It Here
A woman who escaped danger in Afghanistan reflects on what life is like under ICE.
By Lima Halima-Khalil
I drop my three-year-old daughter off at library classes every morning. The library is two minutes from our home in Ashburn, Virginia. Each time, the same thought crosses my mind: Do I have my ID on me? Will my driver’s license be enough if I am stopped?
It is highly unlikely that I will encounter ICE on a two-minute drive to the library. Ashburn isn’t exactly an ICE hub. And yet my fear is constant, embodied, and real. And by the way, I am an American citizen.
I grew up believing America was a mighty country, one so powerful that the rest of the world stood intimidated by its strength. When I first came to the United States in 2006 for an education program from Afghanistan, a country still at war, the vastness of this place revealed itself not only in its size, but in the generosity of the people I met. After that, America became a place I always returned to. I have been part of the American education system since 2010, returning several times for various degrees. I’ve witnessed multiple presidential elections and participated in the most recent one as an American citizen myself.
But after all these years, one lesson about my new home stands out above the rest: This country is led, shaped, and sustained by fear. Outside this country, nations tremble at the military and economic power of the United States, but inside it, people live as though danger is always lurking.
Fear raises money and sustains campaigns. Fear keeps people glued to screens and locked into cycles of outrage. Fear sells guns, justifies surveillance, expands borders and prisons. Much of this fear is not grounded in lived reality but manufactured and amplified by politicians who rely on it to govern. Fear spills into kitchens, sidewalks, classrooms, and moments meant to be ordinary and human.
One of the most brutal tools in this ecosystem right now is ICE. Raids, detentions, and aggressive enforcement practices operate not simply as immigration policy, but as a mechanism of fear, reminding entire communities that their sense of belonging is fragile and conditional. ICE does not need to be everywhere to be effective. The possibility of its presence is enough.
This pervasive fear turns ordinary routines into sites of anxiety. I remember hesitating before offering to share our Thanksgiving meal with our nosy white neighbor, suddenly gripped by thoughts I never imagined I would carry. What if he calls the police on us and claims I was trying to poison him? What if kindness itself is misread as a threat, or hospitality as danger?
Afghans discovered how quickly they could become the “other,” regardless of their sacrifices, their loyalty, and their love for this country.
I recognize these impulses, because fear is not new to me. I lost my school, my home, my loved ones, and eventually my country because I wanted freedom from fear. Millions of Afghans had believed in democracy when America promised it to us for 20 years, until the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. We voted, we hoped, we worked alongside our American partners for a shared dream, but that freedom never came. In 2020, when my 24-year-old sister was killed by the Taliban in an IED attack in her car, that truth became undeniable. I understood then that Afghanistan was no longer safe, and that realization is what led me to come to the United States permanently.
When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, many Afghans, including members of my own family, were evacuated and brought into this country by our American allies. They arrived in this country under extremely harsh circumstances, believing they would find dignity, safety, and a chance to contribute. Instead, they discovered how quickly they could become the “other,” regardless of their sacrifices, their loyalty, and their love for this country.
I was reminded of this again in November of last year, after a man from Afghanistan, who had been trained and worked for the CIA in his country, shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Overnight, an entire community began to be seen, once again, as terrorists. Instead of a careful and humane conversation about mental health, trauma, or resettlement failures, the Trump administration halted all immigration from Afghanistan and pledged to re-examine green card holders from 19 countries. Afghans, many of whom fled the very forces America claims to oppose, were once again forced to prove their innocence.
This is how fear functions. It identifies a moment of tragedy, strips it of context, assigns collective guilt, and converts pain into political currency.
For a long time, I believed that fear in this country belonged primarily to people of color, that violence was uneven, predictable, and racialized. Then the killings of Renée Good and later Alex Pretti shattered that belief. They forced a painful realization that in today’s America, no one is safe, not five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, not women citizens like Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales and Nasra Ahmed, not elderly citizens like Scott Thao or longtime residents like Harjit Kaur, not white Americans, either.
Lately, I have felt fear settle into my own body in a way I did not expect. I realized I had been going to sleep holding fear, living with the same quiet dread that so many people here carry without ever naming it. One night, I caught myself thinking, almost with disbelief: Congratulations, Lima, you are an American now.
But it does not have to be this way. Americans deserve more than this constant weight of dread, clinging to them like a second skin. We deserve a country where fear is not the engine that keeps the system running, where safety is not promised to some by threatening others, and where power is not sustained by keeping people afraid.
Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., is the program director of the “I Stand With You” campaign at ArtLords, a collective she co-founded, where she mobilizes global awareness against gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Her research explores youth resilience amid violence and displacement. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, TRT World, and academic publications.
"Life Is Still an Open Wound"
Four years after the Taliban seized her country, Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., reflects on the losses, joys, and complexity of life for young Afghans.
On August 15, 2021, time did not just stop; it dissolved. One moment, I was at my desk in Virginia, an Afghan researcher piecing together the life stories of Afghan youth for my doctoral research; the next, I was holding my breath between phone calls I could not miss. My computer screen became my only window to my country slipping away: convoys of cars carrying loved ones I could only follow on Google Maps, the low, frantic hum of evacuation messages on What’s App, and the heavy silence between each update.
That day marked the beginning of the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, following a deal signed with the Taliban that effectively handed the country over to them. The elected president fled, and fear settled like smoke across the nation. Thousands rushed to the airport in blind panic, terrified of what the return of Taliban rule would mean. Many of the young people I had interviewed joined the crowds at the gates along with their families (and mine too), desperate for a flight to anywhere. Between August 15 and the final U.S. military departure on the night of August 30, over 200 people died at or near the airport: some trampled in stampedes, some shot, some who fell from planes, and 182 of them killed in a suicide bombing on August 26.
It is hard to explain how, in an instant, everything that anchors your life, your home, family, career, the freedoms you’ve built over a lifetime, can be stripped away. You are left with two choices: walk through the valley of death into a new world naked without any resources, or stay in darkness, losing every human freedom and shred of dignity under the Taliban barbarism. Every year on this day, I try to tell my story and the stories of hundreds of my countrymen and women. I have never quite managed to capture the full weight of what we lived through, or what we are still enduring. But I know who I am: I am Lima Halima-Khalil, and I know that if we do not tell these stories, we risk losing more than a country; we risk losing the truth of who we were and who we still are.
Watching my country disappear
That day, as haunting footage of young men clinging to U.S. military planes, their bodies falling through the sky, was shown over and over on TV, my inbox was flooded in real time:
“Lima, they’ve reached the city gates.”
“My office is closed, they told us not to come.”
“Can you help me get my sister out?”
I typed until my fingers ached—evacuation forms, frantic emails, open tabs of flight lists—while my mind kept circling back to my sister Natasha. She was 24 when the Taliban killed her with an IED in 2020 on her way to work. Every young woman who called me that August day and over the last four years sounded like her: “Please, Lima, don’t leave me here. Save me.” Somewhere in that blur of urgency and grief, I knew I was watching my country disappear in real time.
The words of one young woman—an accomplished artist—still echo: “I wasn’t mourning just a country. I was mourning the version of myself that could only exist in that Afghanistan.”
In the months and years that followed, I carried my interviewees’ stories inside me. I felt the humiliation of the young woman who had to pretend to be the wife of a stranger just to cross a border. I felt the fear of the female journalist who hid in the bathroom each time the Taliban raided her office. I felt the silent cry of the father who arrived in a foreign land with his toddler son and wife and wandered the streets in winter, looking for shelter. I had nightmares over a young man’s account of seven months in a Taliban prison, tortured for the “crime” of encouraging villagers to send girls to school.
Four years later, August 15 is still an open wound. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school and university. Women are barred from most jobs, from traveling alone, from their own public spaces. Half the nation is imprisoned; the rest live under constant surveillance.
Believe in change
However, the past four years have not been made up of grief alone. Even in exile, even under occupation, life has found a way in. I have witnessed many Afghan women earning their master’s degrees in exile. I have seen my young participants inside the country opening secret schools for Afghan girls in their homes and enrolling in online degree courses, while those in exile run online book clubs and classes for girls, refusing to let hope die. I have seen families reunited after being separated for four years. I see Afghan identity and tradition celebrated more than ever.
In my own life, some moments reminded me why I still fight: celebrating the birth of my daughter, Hasti; dancing with friends after completing 140 hours of interviews for my PhD; standing on international stages to speak against gender apartheid, carrying my participants’ words across borders; watching my research shape conversations that challenge the erasure of my people.
Like the two sides of yin and yang, these years have been both destructive and generative. One hopeless day, I called a participant still in Jalalabad. Halfway through, I asked, “What is giving you hope today?” She didn’t pause: “The belief in change. I don’t believe things will remain like this, where women are not allowed to live with full potential in our country. I will not stop my part, which is to keep studying and to believe that I will be the first female president of Afghanistan.”
Hope resides in me, too. This year, on this painful anniversary, I ask the world: the war that began in 2001 was never Afghanistan’s war, and today, it is still not the burden of Afghan women and girls to carry alone. So please, don’t turn your face away. Do not accept the narrative that this is simply Afghan tradition, that women are meant to live like this. That lie has been fed to you for too long. The women and girls of Afghanistan are humans. Until we see them and treat them that way, this gender apartheid will not end.
Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., is the program director of the “I Stand With You” campaign at ArtLords, a collective she co-founded, where she mobilizes global awareness against gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Her research explores youth resilience amid violence and displacement. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, TRT World, and academic publications.
Four years of the Taliban
  August 14, 2025 Hi Meteor readers, Popping in for the second time this week with a recommendation so fervent, I had to commandeer the newsletter to make it. Last night, I finally saw the Tony-nominated play John Proctor Is the Villain, and I’m still levitating. I cackled with laughter. I cried! The show is set in a high school in rural Georgia, and it unfurls as a class of students reads Arthur Miller’s The Crucible while the #MeToo movement swirls. There are meditations on trust and friendship, jokes about Glee, an epic interpretive dance, feminism club, and such biting, clever dialogue that of course Tina Fey has signed on to produce the movie adaptation. It’s pitch-perfect and brilliant, and here I was thinking 2018 was not a period of time I wanted to revisit at all. If you are anywhere near New York, you must, must, must see it before it closes on September 7. That concludes The Meteor’s Theater Corner. Meanwhile, a special edition of the newsletter below: Today we have a beautiful and moving reflection from Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., who writes to us on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, recalling the tumult and horror of that day and sharing her own perspective as a millennial, mom, and researcher in 2020. But first, the news. Stage whispering, Mattie Kahn  WHAT'S GOING ONTaylor Swift, Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift, for starters. Also, Trump is headed to his much-heralded summit in Alaska, where he’ll meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (There will be no showgirls.) Back at home, historians are rightfully freaked out that the White House has expressed a desire to “review” exhibits at the Smithsonian’s museums and galleries, which is the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in democracies. To be clear:  AND:
 “Life is Still An Open Wound”Four years after the Taliban seized her country, Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., reflects on the losses, joys, and complexity of life for young Afghans.On August 15, 2021, time did not just stop; it dissolved. One moment, I was at my desk in Virginia, an Afghan researcher piecing together the life stories of Afghan youth for my doctoral research; the next, I was holding my breath between phone calls I could not miss. My computer screen became my only window to my country slipping away: convoys of cars carrying loved ones I could only follow on Google Maps, the low, frantic hum of evacuation messages on WhatsApp, and the heavy silence between each update. That day marked the beginning of the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, following a deal signed with the Taliban that effectively handed the country over to them. The elected president fled, and fear settled like smoke across the nation. Thousands rushed to the airport in blind panic, terrified of what the return of Taliban rule would mean. Many of the young people I had interviewed joined the crowds at the gates along with their families (and mine too), desperate for a flight to anywhere. Between August 15 and the final U.S. military departure on the night of August 30, over 200 people died at or near the airport: some trampled in stampedes, some shot, some who fell from planes, and 182 of them killed in a suicide bombing on August 26.  THE AUTHOR, LEFT, DEFENDING HER PH.D. ON AFGHAN YOUTH EARLIER THIS SUMMER. It is hard to explain how, in an instant, everything that anchors your life, your home, family, career, the freedoms you’ve built over a lifetime, can be stripped away. You are left with two choices: walk through the valley of death into a new world naked without any resources, or stay in darkness, losing every human freedom and shred of dignity under the Taliban barbarism. Every year on this day, I try to tell my story and the stories of hundreds of my countrymen and women. I have never quite managed to capture the full weight of what we lived through, or what we are still enduring. But I know who I am: I am Lima Halima-Khalil, and I know that if we do not tell these stories, we risk losing more than a country; we risk losing the truth of who we were and who we still are. Watching My Country DisappearThat day, as haunting footage of young men clinging to U.S. military planes, their bodies falling through the sky, was shown over and over on TV, my inbox was flooded in real time: “Lima, they’ve reached the city gates.” “My office is closed, they told us not to come.” “Can you help me get my sister out?” I typed until my fingers ached—evacuation forms, frantic emails, open tabs of flight lists—while my mind kept circling back to my sister Natasha. She was 24 when the Taliban killed her with an IED in 2020 on her way to work. Every young woman who called me that August day and over the last four years sounded like her: “Please, Lima, don’t leave me here. Save me.” Somewhere in that blur of urgency and grief, I knew I was watching my country disappear in real time. The words of one young woman—an accomplished artist—still echo: “I wasn’t mourning just a country. I was mourning the version of myself that could only exist in that Afghanistan.” In the months and years that followed, I carried my interviewees’ stories inside me. I felt the humiliation of the young woman who had to pretend to be the wife of a stranger just to cross a border. I felt the fear of the female journalist who hid in the bathroom each time the Taliban raided her office. I felt the silent cry of the father who arrived in a foreign land with his toddler son and wife and wandered the streets in winter, looking for shelter. I had nightmares over a young man’s account of seven months in a Taliban prison, tortured for the “crime” of encouraging villagers to send girls to school. Four years later, August 15 is still an open wound. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school and university. Women are barred from most jobs, from traveling alone, from their own public spaces. Half the nation is imprisoned; the rest live under constant surveillance. Believing in ChangeHowever, the past four years have not been made up of grief alone. Even in exile, even under occupation, life has found a way in. I have witnessed many Afghan women earning their master’s degrees in exile. I have seen my young participants inside the country opening secret schools for Afghan girls in their homes and enrolling in online degree courses, while those in exile run online book clubs and classes for girls, refusing to let hope die. I have seen families reunited after being separated for four years. I see Afghan identity and tradition celebrated more than ever. In my own life, some moments reminded me why I still fight: celebrating the birth of my daughter, Hasti; dancing with friends after completing 140 hours of interviews for my PhD; standing on international stages to speak against gender apartheid, carrying my participants’ words across borders; watching my research shape conversations that challenge the erasure of my people. Like the two sides of yin and yang, these years have been both destructive and generative. One hopeless day, I called a participant still in Jalalabad. Halfway through, I asked, “What is giving you hope today?” She didn’t pause: “The belief in change. I don’t believe things will remain like this, where women are not allowed to live with full potential in our country. I will not stop my part, which is to keep studying and to believe that I will be the first female president of Afghanistan.” Hope resides in me, too. This year, on this painful anniversary, I ask the world: the war that began in 2001 was never Afghanistan’s war, and today, it is still not the burden of Afghan women and girls to carry alone. So please, don’t turn your face away. Do not accept the narrative that this is simply Afghan tradition, that women are meant to live like this. That lie has been fed to you for too long. The women and girls of Afghanistan are humans. Until we see them and treat them that way, this gender apartheid will not end.  Lima Halima-Khalil, Ph.D., is the program director of the “I Stand With You” campaign at ArtLords, a collective she co-founded, where she mobilizes global awareness against gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Her research explores youth resilience amid violence and displacement. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, TRT World, and academic publications.  WEEKEND READING 📚
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