‘Send your daughters or you get no aid’: the Taliban are making religious schools girls’ only option

Afghan girls at a Kabul madrasa – one of 21,000 Islamic education centres across Afghanistan. Only the Qur’an and Islamic law are studied. Photograph: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, Nahid, 24, was midway through an economics degree. She had hoped to work in a university after she graduated.

Instead, Nahid now spends her mornings at a religious school in the basement of a mosque in the western city of Herat, sitting on the floor and reciting scripture with 50 other women and girls, all dressed in black from head to toe.