“These girls who stand up to the Taliban on the streets are the hope of everyone”

“They entered the university compound heavily armed. I was scared witnessing a gun for the first time. I tried to hide my fear but failed. I was frozen. My friends and I felt like we were in a nightmare. I clutched myself, thinking it might be a dream, but no, this was real. I said to myself, ‘Shahzia, you’ve reached the end’.

For a few moments, the bitter stories I’d heard from the first days of the Taliban regime over the past 20 years came to life in front of my eyes. I was thinking about this very topic when one of the fighters with long hair approached and said in Pashto: ‘you must leave the university’.

No one said anything; all were silent. The university president tried to speak with the commander of the group, but he received a sharp and harsh response. This was the moment we could not expect any good from the group who had been killing others for decades. I was so terrified that I couldn’t speak.

As I looked out the window at the sky, I asked myself: ‘Where have those dreams, those aspirations gone?... They’ve all turned to smoke and disappeared.’

The return of the Taliban was justified to prevent my father’s relatives from stopping me from going to school. They used to say, ‘What’s the use of educating a girl?’ However, I was fortunate that my father was a teacher who knew the value of education and didn’t pay attention to people's words. He allowed me to go to Kabul.

But the Taliban continued to enter with violence, which gradually affected the way protests were conducted.