‘One day the Taliban will need women to be educated’: three sisters on being forced back to Afghanistan

Shallah, Fatimah and Maahi are among hundreds of thousands of Afghan women and girls deported from Iran and Pakistan in the past year to a life of severe restrictions It was a warm summer afternoon on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban entered Kabul and changed the lives of millions. Shallah*, then 16, watched the news at home on the Afghan TV channel Tolo news. She ran crying to the garden, to tell her mother that Afghanistan had fallen.