Mick Hartley

Mahsheed Barzz talks to Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:

The days are so hard for me that I can’t count the minutes or I would lose my mind.

My name is Mahsheed Barzz, I am almost 20, and, like most Afghan girls and women, I am a prisoner in my own house. I am proud of being a girl but more and more I wish I was a boy so I wouldn’t be hidden away like this. When we have internet I watch Emily in Paris — and wonder how we can be on the same planet.

It didn’t used to be like this. Eighteen months ago my life was happy. I got up early to go to Kabul University where I was studying psychology. Then I went to work at a TV station, presenting news and hosting a programme on politics. Lastly, I went to the gym and did sport — I am a member of the women’s national handball team.

Sometimes I met friends in cafés or for walks. At home I often watched English films to try to improve my English. I had so many dreams for the future.

Then the Taliban took over. We’d heard all the stories about when they were in power before from our mothers, how they’d stopped women working and banned girls from school. But that was in the 1990s before I was even born.

We were in shock. I live with my parents, two younger sisters and younger brother. For a month we didn’t go out. We watched the pictures of people crowding the airport to flee but we were too shocked to join them and didn’t have contacts to get us out.

And I believed the Taliban would be different from before. How could they be the same? I mean it was 2021.

The first thing they did was ban women’s sports, so I couldn’t play handball. They closed high schools, so my middle sister, who is 13, could no longer attend. My mum was a journalist working for a magazine — my dad is unwell so we were the breadwinners.

To start with things weren’t so bad. After a month I went back to my job. It seemed OK. In the past I wore a chador or coat and headscarf but now they said we had to wear a hijab then a black hijab. I went back to university, though we were in segregated classes.

But my mum’s magazine closed. And ministers would not come on my TV show — they said they would not sit with a girl. They abused me because I gave interviews to foreign media.

Then they said I had to wear a mask over my face.

Sometimes Taliban stopped me and asked, “Why don’t you have a mahram [a male escort]?”

Over the past few months life has been getting darker. The Taliban have brought in more and more restrictions.

They stopped us going to gyms and parks. Then they said girls could no longer go to university.

Then a month ago some of them came to my house. They entered with guns and told my parents: “If your daughter does not stop working we will kill you all.” I was on my way home from work. My family were terrified, particularly my little sister who is eight. Every day she talks about it — will the Taliban come and kill us?

Now I am in hiding. Even my friends don’t know where I am. I have stopped working and I don’t know how we will survive because mine was the only salary.

I m speaking out because I am not scared any more — all life has been taken from me. I am losing all hope. My family are depressed and scared and soon we will be hungry. No one wants to leave their country and all they know but our only hope is to get out.

It feels as if the world is ignoring Afghan women. If the world doesn’t do anything they will restrict us more and more. They want to keep us like cattle in a shed just to feed us and make us produce offspring.

Nato forces were here 20 years and spent billions of dollars and saw their own soldiers martyred — for what?

Those who left our country in the hands of this barbaric group had no conscience and betrayed the people after promising not to abandon us.

Indeed.