'Afghanistan has been forgotten' but she hasn't forgotten Afghanistan

The fall of Kabul and everything she carries five years later.Two days after Salma's engagement party in Kabul, the Taliban swept back to power in Afghanistan."I woke up and I imagined so many things, but not that the Taliban would be outside," she said.Salma was 22 at the time and halfway through completing her master's degree.Now, 27 and living in Australia, she's watching her home country fade from global attention as it mark five years under Taliban rule."Afghanistan isn't being talked about anymore, Afghanistan has been forgotten."The takeover The Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021.()Salma's family knew the Taliban had seized control over other parts of the country, so they kept the TV on constantly.But when she walked into the lounge room on Sunday, August 15, 2021, the TV was fuzzy. It had been cut."We thought maybe another war would happen but no one was expecting the government to leave," she said."I could see the expressions of fear and sadness on the faces of my family."The embassies were shut, international organisations had left, and prisoners had been released and were all over the city. The US Embassy was evacuated in Kabul.(AP: Rahmat Gul)"I kept thinking, 'what's going to happen to us?'"The image that had been given to us was that if they [the Taliban] see you as Kabul-based, they will shoot you."Salma ran a website that shared stories of Afghan women from around the country.One of Salma's brothers was an Australian citizen who worked in academia. He had travelled to Kabul for her engagement celebration.When Kabul fell, the Australian government contacted him to bring him home. It was through him that Salma's family were able to escape.The airport Hundreds of people outside the international airport in Kabul on the day Salma and her family were there.(AP)Her family, which included her three-month-old nephew, took one pair of clothes each and locked up their home."Driving to the airport was the first time I saw the takeover," she said."It felt like the same city, the same buildings, the same street, but a city of ghosts."You could not see a single woman on the street."It took Salma and her family two attempts over two days to reach the airport due to back-to-back Taliban checkpoints and tanks in the middle of the streets. Taliban forces patrolled the streets of Kabul. Taliban setup back-to-back checkpoints in Kabul. (AP: Rahmat Gul)She could see the chaos from the airport more than a kilometre away."You could hear people firing guns to control the huge crowds," she said. Cars choked the streets as people fled Kabul in 2021.(AFP: Sayed Khodaiberdi Sadat)When they arrived at the airport, Salma said people were begging the foreign militaries to help them, with some mothers holding up their kids."You could just see the crowd of people trying to get closer to the airport, pushing for their future, for their life," she said.After pushing through the crowd and staying overnight in a holding area, Salma and her family boarded a military transport plane to Dubai.'The people I'm leaving behind' Crowds of people flooded the airport for days in 2021.(Reuters: US Marine Corps)Salma boarded the plane and the distance between her and the crowd got longer. ADF troops during the first evacuation mission out of Kabul.(Defence: Sergeant Glen McCarthy)She looked around and saw all the people she was leaving behind."What's going to happen to the tens of thousands of people behind me?"What's going to happen to those children crying on the laps of their mother or in the hands of their father?"I could see so many girls, what was going to happen to them?"I kept thinking of family and friends, my own room, my book collections."I had feelings of sadness, feeling of guilt, feeling of hope, feeling powerful, feeling weak, feeling uncertain."My body was swelling into numbness and then aliveness."Landing in Australia Australian, New Zealand and Afghan citizens on a military plane evacuating Afghanistan in August 2021.(Department of Defence)Salma said the day she arrived in Australia was the day her life split in two."One happening in the vacuum of 22 years in an extremely beautiful but tragic city in Kabul and the next in Australia," she said."It's my Kabul experience that led me to my Australian life."And it's my Australian life that's being completed by the identity I bring from Afghanistan." Salma has since continued her higher education in Australia.(ABC: Supplied)A few weeks after landing in Australia, Salma enrolled in the final semester of her masters degree.She has continued her education, completing a postgraduate certificate in global development and is about to start her PhD, which will explore feminism in Afghanistan. Salma on the day of her graduation.(Supplied)'The world has forgotten Afghanistan' Afghan women face severe and restrictive sanctions from public spaces.(AP: Felipe Dana)Watching her home country fade from global attention exacts a heavy emotional toll, Salma said."Getting out of the country never automatically means getting out of what's happening in Afghanistan," she said."In the past five years, every time the Taliban have decided to shut the universities or impose a new restriction over women, it has been emotionally the same for me."And it's not just the banning of education, it's the pushing women into uncertainty." Girls are banned from attending school after the age of 13 in Afghanistan.(AP: Felipe Dana) The Taliban have legitimised child marriage, removing minimum age protections and allowing a girl's silence to be treated as consent.(AP: Petros Giannakouris) Women are banned from attending university education.(AP: Ebrahim Noroozi)Born during the first period of the Taliban, she said she represented a generation who had been silenced."That's my identity. That's my country. That's my friends."What was already a bad situation for many Afghans had become considerably worse under the Taliban, Salma said."When people talk about pre-2021 they describe it as calm and beautiful but the situation was never good … it was just bad in another way," she said."I got the chance to go to school and question the systems around me but the price of that chance was being paid by a girl living in a war zone in another part of the country."We have to acknowledge that if we reduce the entire history to 2021, we lose a much longer history of Afghan women's lives before that." Protests to maintain their rights to business participation were not heard by Taliban leaders.(AP) Afghan women protested the closure of the Ministry for Women's Affairs after the Taliban took power in 2021.(Reuters: Ali Khara)Severe and restrictive sanctions on Afghan women have forced their withdrawal from public life.The Taliban shut down the Ministry for Women's Affairs after taking power in 2021.Women are banned from most forms of employment.Women's participation in sport is forbidden under Taliban rule. A number of women posed for an AP photographer for portraits with the equipment of the sports they loved following the ban.(AP: Ebrahim Noroozi) Some of them continue to practice their sports in secret. (AP: Ebrahim Noroozi) Afghan women protested against the sports ban by posing for these photos.(AP: Ebrahim Noroozi)Women and girls over the age of 13 are formally banned from secondary and university education — the only country to formally do so, according to UNESCO.They cannot travel more than 72km without a male chaperone.Afghan women have been forced to abandon small businesses.Beauty salons have closed and women are banned from parks, gyms and bathhouses. Beauty salons were forced to close in Kabul in 2023. (Reuters: Ali Khara) Afghani women can no longer attend beauty salons in Kabul.(Reuters: Ali Khara) Women across Afghanistan are banned from most types of employment. (Reuters: Ali Khara)Women's voices have been banned from public, including singing, poetry, reading aloud or broadcasting, under "morality law".Dress codes have become extreme, mandating full-body covering and dark clothing.In May, the Taliban legitimised child marriage, removing minimum age protections and allowing a girl's silence to be treated as consent. The Taliban have legitimatised child marriage in Afghanistan.(ABC News: Haidarr Jones) Women's voices have been banned in public.(AP Photo: Ebrahim Noroozi) Full-body covering mandates have been imposed on Afghani women.(ABC News: Haidarr Jones)Protests to maintain their rights to education, sports and business participation were not heard by Taliban leaders.But Salma said Afghan women continued to fight and did not only want to be represented as victims."I think many women share the desire to have agency over their own lives, to study, to work, to move, to make decisions and determine their own futures."We have been resisting. We have been questioning," she said."Afghan women don't need saviours, they need platforms." The international community has broadly condemned restrictions on women in Afghanistan.(ABC News) Women on the streets protesting one month after Taliban rule.(AP: Wali Sabawoon)