These Afghan women in Europe aim to bring change to their home country
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 17/100
| Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File Girls walk home from a morning session of school in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 8, 2012. Loading...
Aug. 15, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET | Aarau, Switzerland
On August 15, 2021, the future that Maryam had been building for herself as a student at Kabul University collapsed.
News the Taliban had seized the Afghan capital spread fast, through text messages urging students to flee the campus.
“It was a big shock. Everyone went home or to the airport,” says Maryam, who’s in her mid-20s, sipping an iced matcha outside a library in the Swiss city of Aarau.
Five years after the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan, and the Taliban seized power of the government in Kabul, women in that country have lost most of their basic rights. But these Afghan women living abroad are not giving up hope for change.
The library offers both an escape from the single room she shares at an asylum center here and the quiet she needs to study German.
Maryam is one of three Afghan women, now resettled in Europe, the Monitor spoke with for this story. Each started from scratch here in the West. And each of them has never stopped hoping for change back home. Two are being identified with pseudonyms out of concern for the safety of relatives in Afghanistan.
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan five years ago ushered in an era of dehumanizing restrictions for women and girls. Simply being a woman from that country is enough to be granted asylum in some European countries, including Denmark and the Netherlands. Most of the world’s 2.6 million registered Afghan refugees are in Iran and Pakistan. In 2021, following the Taliban’s rise to power, Afghans submitted 102,000 asylum applications in the European Union, more than double the previous year. In 2025, they lodged nearly 64,000 first-time asylum applications and another 6,207 in Switzerland.
“The Taliban have stripped women and girls of their rights and dignity,” says Shaharzad Akbar, executive director of Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organization. “This situation has led to mass exodus of educated and professional women from Afghanistan.”
Leaving Afghanistan is not easy, particularly for single women. And Europe has become less welcoming to Afghan refugees in recent years. But the continent has offered the kind of education that was taken from women at home – and that many see as a tool of both resistance and preparation for a future they still want to help shape in their home country.
Dominique Soguel Maryam (a pseudonym), who was granted asylum after fleeing the Taliban, takes a book from a library in the Swiss city of Aarau. Starting over German is not the first foreign language that Maryam has tackled in pursuit of a better future. By the time Kabul fell to the Taliban, she had completed six semesters of Chinese alongside a cohort of about 30 university students who believed their best prospects for jobs and scholarships would come from the East.
“Before the Taliban came to power, there were many opportunities for girls,” recalls Maryam, who belongs to the Farsi-speaking Hazara minority of Afghanistan.
That soon changed. Female students were first required to wear hijabs, with colorful headscarves tolerated for a while. Then only black was allowed, and full-face coverings became mandatory. By December 2022, women were banned from campus altogether. As of June 2026, the Taliban has issued 166 decrees specifically targeting the rights of women and girls, according to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
“Afghanistan is the worst women’s rights crisis in the world,” says Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, pointing out that Afghanistan is the only nation in the world where women and girls are barred from secondary and higher education.
Today Maryam hopes studying German will pave the way for a bachelor’s degree. She carries the pain of separation from her husband and parents, who are still in Kabul. Her sisters contact her from there constantly.
Freedom for Maryam takes shape in simple pleasures. At the top of the list is taking the train to discover different parts of Switzerland, and learning to ride a scooter. Back in Kabul, she would be confined to her family’s home or the city’s sole park designated only for single women.
“The best part is I have my freedom here and I have my hope,” she says. “I hope I can find something that can help not just my sisters but all the girls in Afghanistan. They, too, have their hopes.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File When the Taliban was overthrown in Afghanistan in late 2001, many new schools for girls were built. Pictured here is a group of first graders from Speena Adi Primary and Middle School in Kabul, April 8, 2012. Fighting for a chance to learn Sitara grew up in Afghanistan’s cultural capital of Herat, where her mother, who married at age 13 and never attended school, was her constant champion. Though illiterate, she sat by Sitara as her child learned the alphabet, and stayed up late to cook and keep her company when she finally reached university.
“I wish I had had this opportunity,” she often told Sitara, who went on to become a teacher.
Violence drove Sitara from Afghanistan. Taliban fighters gunned down one of her brothers in the street in retaliation for a rejected marriage proposal.
She flew to the country of Georgia with her sister and continued to Greece. Finding little support there, Sitara sought better conditions in Switzerland, only to be moved through seven “prison-like” camps and deported back to Greece under EU asylum rules.
Over the past five years, Europe’s political debate has shifted away from resettlement and toward returns. Brussels recently hosted a Taliban delegation in June for migration talks, and Germany has sent four deportation flights to Afghanistan, deporting 154 Afghans between August 2024 and April 2026.
Now more settled in Athens, Sitara paints landscapes in her free time.…
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