'It's tragic' Teen Afghan girls on life without school

Barred from education for more than 1,000 days, girls face forced marriage, violence and isolation with no end in sight

- Annie Kelly, Tom Levitt, Hikmat Noori and Rukhshana reporters

Just over three years ago, Asma's future contained many possibilities. Aged 15, she was at secondary school. After that lay the prospect of university and then onwards, striding forwards into the rest of her life.

Like many Afghan girls, she understood that education was her route out of the isolation and repression that had constricted the lives of her mother and grandmother under the previous Taliban regime. She was part of a new generation of Afghan women who had the chance to build independent and economically autonomous lives.

In May 2021, a few months before Taliban militants swept to power, Asma was in class when bombs began exploding outside her secondary school. She woke up in hospital to learn that 85 people, mostly other schoolgirls, had been killed. By the time she had started to recover, the Taliban were in charge and her chances of returning to school were over.

It is now more than 1,000 days since the Taliban declared schools only for boys, and an estimated 1.2 million teenage girls such as Asma were in effect banned from secondary schools in Afghanistan.

What has happened to them since has been catastrophic: forced and early marriage, domestic violence, suicide, drug addiction and an eradication from all aspects of public life, with no end in sight.

"We've now reached 1,000 days, but there is no end date to the horror of what is happening to teenage girls in Afghanistan," said Heather Barr from Human Rights Watch. "What the Taliban have done is not put the dreams of all these girls on hold, they have obliterated them."

Without being able to go to school, Asma has been forced into marriage to a man she didn't know, exchanging the four walls of her father's house for those of her new husband's family.