Women in Afghanistan have set up secret businesses to escape the brutal restrictions of the Taliban, who swept to power two years ago today.
Since the August 2021 takeover, the group has become entrenched as rulers of Afghanistan and faces no significant opposition that could topple the regime.
The Taliban‘s seizing of power resulted in the end of two decades of increased economic opportunities and freedom for women in the country.
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‘No hope’ for Afghan women
Marzia Babakarkhail, a former family court judge in Afghanistan, told Sky News that women in the country are “in a battle”.
“We have no happiness outside or inside Afghanistan. We have no hope, we have no future for the young generation. There is just darkness and hopelessness,” she said.
The Taliban banned women from doing most jobs, barred girls and young women from secondary school and university education and imposed harsh curtailments on their freedoms.
All the while, the country faces a severe economic crisis, with 85% of the population living under the poverty line.
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But some women whose businesses were destroyed have made the transition to smaller, underground enterprises to make ends meet.
Laila Haidari’s restaurant was a lively hive of activity in Kabul that was known for its music and poetry evenings and was popular with intellectuals, writers, journalists and foreigners.
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She reinvested the profits from the restaurant into a drugs rehabilitation centre she set up nearby.
But just a few days after the Taliban seized power, the group destroyed Ms Haidari’s restaurant, looted the furniture, and threw out the patients attending the rehab centre.
Just five months later, she opened a secret craft centre where women can earn a small income stitching dresses and fashioning jewellery from melted-down bullet casings.
“I opened this centre to provide jobs for women who desperately need them,” Ms Haidari said.
“This is not a permanent solution, but at least it will help them put food on their table.”
The centre now helps fund an underground school providing 200 girls with lessons in maths and English. Some attend in person, others online.
“I don’t want Afghan girls to forget their knowledge and then, in a few years, we will have another illiterate generation,” Ms Haidairi said, referring to the women and girls deprived of education during the Taliban’s last period of rule from 1996 to 2001.
The centre, which also makes men’s clothing, rugs and home decor items, employs about 50 women who earn around £47 a month.
“If the Taliban try to stop me I’ll tell them they must pay me and pay these women,” she said.
“Otherwise, how will we eat?”
Dressmaker Wajiha Sekhawat, 25, created outfits for clients based on celebrities’ social media posts before August 2021.
But now her monthly income has fallen from about £470 to less than £150 partly due to demand for party dresses and business outfits plummeting after most women lost their jobs.
She would travel to Pakistan and Iran to buy fabrics for clients but now cannot travel without a male chaperone – a mahram – and often cannot afford the cost of doing so.
When she sent a male family member to Pakistan in her place he returned with the wrong fabrics.
“I used to make regular business trips abroad by myself, but now I can’t even go out for a coffee,” Ms Sekhawat said.
“It’s suffocating. Some days I just go to my room and scream.”
The restrictions are particularly difficult for the country’s estimated two million widows, as well as single women and divorcees who may not have anyone to act as their male chaperone.
After her husband’s death in 2015, Sadaf relied on the income from her busy Kabul beauty salon to support her five children.
She offered hairstyling, make-up, manicures and wedding makeovers to a wide range of women from government workers to TV presenters.
Sadaf, 43, who asked to use a pseudonym, began running her business from home after the Taliban told her to shut her salon.
But with clients having lost their own jobs, most stopped coming or cut back and her monthly income dropped dramatically.
Last month the authorities ordered all salons to shut down, saying they offered treatments that went against their Islamic values.
More than 60,000 women are likely to lose their jobs as a result, according to industry estimates.
While the future looks grim for women’s freedoms in the country, aid agencies said they are emphasising the economic benefits of allowing women to work when negotiating with Taliban authorities.
“We tell them if we create jobs it means that these women can feed their family, it means they are paying taxes,” Melissa Cornet, an adviser to CARE Afghanistan, said.
“We try to have a pragmatic approach and usually it’s quite successful. The Taliban are very keen on the economic argument.”
There are mechanisms to protect the regime in events like this and the Revolutionary Guard, which was founded in 1979 precisely for that purpose, will be a major player in what comes next.
In the immediate term, vice-president Mohammed Mokhber will assume control and elections will be held within 50 days.
Mokhber isn’t as close to the supreme leader as Raisi was, and won’t enjoy his standing, but he has run much of Khamenei’s finances for years and is credited with helping Iran evade some of the many sanctions levied on it.
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Drone footage of helicopter crash site
Raisi’s successor will most likely be the chosen candidate of the supreme leader and certainly another ultra-conservative hardliner – a shift back to the moderates is highly unlikely.
Likewise, we shouldn’t expect any significant change in Iran’s foreign activities or involvement with the war in Gaza. It will be business as usual, as much as possible.
However, after years of anti-government demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, this might be a moment for the protest movement to rise up and take to the streets again.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died after the helicopter he was travelling in crashed in a mountainous area of northwest Iran.
Rescuers found the burned remains of the aircraft on Monday morning after the president and his foreign minister had been missing for more than 12 hours.
“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported “all passengers of the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister were martyred”.
State TV said images showed it had smashed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash.
“President Raisi’s helicopter was completely burned in the crash… unfortunately, all passengers are feared dead,” an official told Reuters.
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President of Iran killed in crash
As the sun rose, rescuers saw the wreckage from around 1.25 miles, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, told state media.
Iranian news agency IRNA said the president was flying in an American-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Mr Raisi, 63, who was seen as a frontrunner to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, was travelling back from Azerbaijan where he had opened a dam with the country’s president.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, also died in the crash.
The governor of East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were also said to have been on board when the helicopter crashed in fog on Sunday.
Iranian media initially described it as a “hard landing”.
The chief of staff of Iran’s army had ordered all military resources and the Revolutionary Guard to be deployed in the search, which had been hampered by bad weather.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to react to the news of Mr Raisi’s death.
“India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow,” he said in a post on X.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s president crashed during bad weather on Sunday.
But who is Ebrahim Raisi – a leader who faces sanctions from the US and other nations over his involvement in the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.
The president, 63, who was travelling alongside the foreign minister and two other key Iranian figures when their helicopter crashed, had been travelling across the far northwest of Iran following a visit to Azerbaijan.
Mr Raisi is a hardliner and former head of the judiciary who some have suggested could one day replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Because of his part in the sentencing of thousands of prisoners of conscience to death back in the 1980s, he was nicknamed the Butcher of Tehranas he sat on the so-called Death Panel, for which he was then sanctioned by the US.
Both a revered and a controversial figure, Mr Raisi supported the country’s security services as they cracked down on all dissent, including in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini – the woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly – and the nationwide protests that followed.
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The months-long security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iranwas responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Ms Amini’s death after her arrest for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
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The president also supported Iran’s unprecedented decision in April to launch a drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war with Hamas, the ruling militant group in Gaza responsible for the 7 October attacks which saw 1,200 people killed in southern Israel.
Involvement in mass executions
Mr Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under the president, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections.
Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraineand has continued arming proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
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He successfully ran for the presidency back in August 2021 in a vote that got the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history as all of his potentially prominent opponents were barred from running under Iran’s vetting system.
A presidency run in 2017 saw him lose to Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate cleric who as president reached Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
‘Very involved in anything’
Alistair Bunkall, Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, said the president is “a major figure in Iranian political and religious society” but “he’s not universally popular by any means” as his administration has seen a series of protests in the past few years against his and the government’s “hardline attitude”.
Mr Raisi is nonetheless “considered one of the two frontrunners to potentially take over” the Iranian regime when the current supreme leader dies, Bunkall said.
He added the president would have been “instrumental” in many of Iran’s activities in the region as he “would’ve been very involved in anything particularly what has been happening in Israel and the surrounding areas like Lebanon and Gaza and the Houthis over the last seven and a bit months”.