Mick Hartley

Bamiyan was the site of the Taliban's most publicised act of cultural barbarism, when in 2001 they blew up the two huge Buddhas carved into the mountain that dating from the 6th century. After the Taliban were overthrow, the area became something of a model for a new Afghanistan where women could thrive, as Christina Lamb reports. But that's all finished now.

High up in the Hindu Kush, 100 miles north of Kabul, Bamiyan was a showpiece for the new Afghanistan.

The mountain valley held rock festivals, boasted the country’s first female governor, first girls’ cycling team and first female-run café. There was a women’s ski club. Female university students in brightly coloured clothes often outnumbered their male colleagues….

Winding up through a mountain pass to arrive through the Taliban-manned gate, I find a very different Bamiyan from my last visit almost two years ago when it hummed with life and was even attracting foreign tourists.

Now the hotels are closed and so is the airport. Women are almost nowhere to be seen and behind closed doors female cyclists are destroying beloved bikes and families are hiding their daughters.

In a secret location, I meet Masuma, 31, who worked as an activist running a foreign-funded programme for female empowerment.

She is seeing the town for the first time since the Taliban takeover and looks dazed at the sudden collapse of her world. “Bamiyan was the province where women had the loudest voice but now we are silenced,” she said. “Even children are terrified. My seven-year-old daughter asks, ‘Will the Taliban kill me if I don’t wear a veil?’”

As word spread on August 15 that the Taliban were coming, she and others fled into the mountains. “It was the worst day of my life,” she said. “I felt we lost everything.”

Masuma had spent the past 11 years helping women become entrepreneurs and was working with 91 of them on projects such as a cake business and jam production, as well as teaching gender equality. Now she, like all Afghan women, has been ordered to stay at home. “My women keep calling and asking what will become of them. How can I answer? I don’t even know what will become of myself.”

The population round Bamiyan are Hazara Shias, considered infidels by the Taliban who are mostly Pashtuns and hard-line Sunnis. They were targeted by the Taliban before, and are being targeted again now.

No community has more to fear than the Hazara. About three million people, they are the largest minority in Afghanistan, making up about 10 per cent of the population, and a conspicuous one with their distinctive features. They are said to be descended from soldiers of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader who invaded Afghanistan in the 13th century.

They have long been persecuted by rulers from the Pashtun tribe but never more than under the Taliban, who massacred about 2,000 Hazaras in a two-day frenzy when they conquered Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, as well as many in Bamiyan. “We still walk on bones,” said Kabir, 60, who runs a carpet shop in the bazaar. “I fear for my son.” Three mass graves, found near the airport by the UN after the Taliban were toppled 20 years ago, serve as a brutal reminder. One contained 21 members of the same family.

“The Taliban return has brought our bad experience back to life,” said Baryali Amiri. “They came to my village and killed 70 males just in one night, old and young. They dragged them from their houses, tied their hands and shot them. I was lucky not to be there.”

According to Asef Mubalegh, the former deputy governor, the Taliban murdered more than 300 men and boys in one day in the district of Yakawlang in the east of the province.

“People had come out to make peace and they mowed them down,” he said.

This time around the Taliban have insisted they will not discriminate against those with differing religions or ethnicities. In April they put out a video featuring the Shia cleric Maulvi Mahdi Mujahid, a rare Hazara Taliban, urging his people to join their ranks. In their first week in power they allowed Shias to commemorate the Ashura holiday.

But in Bamiyan, just three days after they entered the province, they blew up a modern statue of Abdul Alia Mazari, a much revered Shia militia leader who was tortured and killed by the Taliban in 1995. Broken stones lie around the empty pedestal. Mazari’s name and picture have also been torn down at the airport.

“That was a clear message,” said Mubalegh, who is in hiding. So, he said, was the announcement last week of the Taliban cabinet. It is almost entirely Pashtun, with not a single Hazara or woman.

“Look at their ‘inclusive’ government which is inclusive only of Taliban,” he added. “How can we trust them? I don’t think the day is far off when they will make a repeat of Yakawlang.”

It’s a shocking turnaround from in 2005, when Dr Habiba Sarabi, a haematologist and mother of three, became Afghanistan’s first female governor, a post she held till 2013. Foreign dignitaries travelled to Bamiyan to meet her.

“It was a golden time for Afghanistan,” she said. “I could show that women are equal to men, people had freedom to talk and express ideas, girls were studying, cycling and skating and there was hope and light for women. Two more female governors were appointed in Afghanistan after me. Overnight all those gains and achievements have collapsed.

“The international community brought fake hope to Afghan people, then they demolished everything — I wish they’d never come.”

Joe Biden decided it wasn't worth the effort, though, and the Hazara – especially the women – no longer have a future.