Afghanistan has slipped from the world’s front pages as attention centres on the war in the Middle East, but aid groups and UN officials say the country’s emergency has not eased — it has hardened.
“The perception is that Afghanistan is not in a crisis because it is out of news,” Katharina Ritz, the outgoing Head of the ICRC Delegation in Kabul, told RTÉ News.
In a nation of 45 million, the pressures remain intense: international assistance is shrinking, refugees are crossing back from Iran, and the Taliban are tightening their grip — with women’s rights bearing much of the cost.
Those dynamics spilled into European politics this week, when a dispute erupted in Brussels over an EU invitation to Taliban officials for talks on deporting Afghans whose asylum claims in Europe have failed.
EU officials said the talks were “technical”.
Inside Afghanistan, tensions also broke into the open as police fired on demonstrators during a rare protest over the arrest of women accused of breaching the country’s harsh dress rules.
At least one person was killed.
Local police called them “rioters” and said the authorities took “a serious, Sharia, and principled approach to any action that disrupts public security”.
Previously, a spokesperson for the Taliban – referred to as the “de facto authorities” – said in a statement that reports of the arrests were “rumours”, adding the “hijab is a divine command, a law that we are obliged to implement”.
Taliban security personnel keeps watch amid Eid al-Fitr prayers in Kandahar
The UN and humanitarian organisations warn that the combination of deep need and increasingly restrictive Taliban rule is inflicting damage that will echo for years across Afghan society.
Afghanistan stands out demographically: while many wealthy countries grapple with ageing populations, it is strikingly young, with more than half of its people under 25.
Georgette Gagnon, the UN’s acting head of mission in Afghanistan, said there was “a whole generation coming of age at a time of constrained opportunity – particularly for girls, but also increasingly for boys”.
“Many are looking elsewhere for a future,” she said.
That search for safety and opportunity is colliding with a new reality: millions of Afghans are being compelled to return from nearby states, including people fleeing the war in Iran and escalating strains with Pakistan.
Iran stepped up deportations of Afghan migrants following US and Israeli bombing last June amid accusations levied against them by the Iranian regime of “spying” for Israel.
“It was very sad to see girls coming over,” Peter Power head of UNICEF Ireland told RTÉ News, describing a recent visit to Herat Province on the Iranian border.
“They were arriving over in their jeans and their long hair and from their schools… into a very, very different environment,” he said.
In 2024, Meryl Streep spoke about the rights of women in Afghanistan at the UN General Assembly
Pakistan and Afghanistan have been locked in a conflict that has killed hundreds of people so far this year.
Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of sponsoring terrorism, which the group denies.
For Afghan women, conditions continue to worsen, 18 months after actor Meryl Streep used the UN General Assembly in New York to spotlight their plight.
A “squirrel”, she told delegates, had more rights than an Afghan girl.
“What we are witnessing are severe and growing restrictions – the imposition of systemic and institutionalised harm with long-term generational consequences for Afghan society as a whole,” according to Ms Gagnon.
For observers, the breadth of constraints on women and girls can be difficult to comprehend.
With girls barred from schooling beyond age 12, an estimated 3.8 million girls aged seven to 18 are out of school, including more than 2.6 million adolescent girls.
“Each year, approximately 250,000 more girls are permanently excluded from secondary education pathways, creating a lost generation of talent and potential,” Ms Gagnon told the UN Security Council.
Last month, a decree enacted the “silence rule”, which interprets a girl’s silence after puberty as agreement to marriage.
Amnesty International said the code further compounded the already dismal situation for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.
“It effectively strips them of all autonomy by eliminating any notion of consent, granting male relatives control over marital arrangements and providing minimal avenues to challenge forced unions,” said Isabelle Lassee, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for South Asia.
“Its provisions collectively institutionalise and normalise child marriage,” she said.
Women cannot go to parks, gardens, gyms, public baths, and restaurants
Women are shut out of most public-sector employment and are increasingly restricted from healthcare work, as maternal deaths climb.
For every 100,000 births, 521 mothers die, according to UN figures.
That’s one woman every hour who dies in childbirth.
Women cannot go to parks, gardens, gyms, public baths, and restaurants.
They cannot leave home without being fully covered.
Even their voices cannot be heard in public.
The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — widely known as the “morality police” — enforces these rules.
Created soon after the Taliban returned to power following the US withdrawal in 2021, the ministry has overseen what the UN describes as the systematic removal of women from public life.
The Taliban’s steady consolidation of authority is also forcing a hard choice on the international community, UN officials say.
Kwabena Asante-Ntiamoah, representative of the UN’s population fund in Afghanistan (UNFPA), which leads on reproductive health, said the decision often comes down to engaging with the de facto authorities or leaving Afghans without support.
UN agencies, he said, have opted for engagement.
“Let me give you a practical example,” he told reporters on a visit to UN headquarters this week.
“We currently have a ban on female medical institutes,” he said.
“I need to engage, let’s say, with the Minister of Public Health to get his understanding and to see what are the dynamics that are ongoing,” he added.
He said the issue of whether the Taliban should be formally recognised is for the Security Council and General Assembly to decide.
Afghanistan’s seat in New York remains held by an ambassador from the former republic, which no longer exists.
Recognition, Mr Asante-Ntiamoah said, “is a very political sensitive question”.
He said: “However, for the UN agencies, funds, and programmes, we cannot abandon the Afghans – that is the point.
“We cannot just abandon Afghans because of the Taliban.”
Data from Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
In Europe, however, even limited contact with the Taliban drew a backlash this week.
Before the planned Brussels meeting with Taliban officials on returning rejected Afghan asylum seekers, opponents described the move as “a nadir”.
“These talks are not about the sweeping restrictions on women’s rights,” said Shada Islam of New Horizons Project, a Brussel’s based consultancy, writing in the Guardian.
“They are about forcibly deporting asylum seekers whose claims to protection in Europe have been rejected – deportation to a country where returnees face arbitrary arrest detention and torture, and which is in the midst of a food crisis,” she wrote.
The EU does not recognise the Taliban regime.
EU humanitarian aid to Afghanistan — about €160 million — is structured to bypass the de facto authorities, going instead directly to aid organisations and emergency relief agencies.
The People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan, a civil-society group established to investigate human rights abuses, urged the EU to rescind the invitation.
In a statement, the group called it “a dangerous step forward towards the normalisation of a regime responsible for gender persecution”.
“This invitation contradicts the EU’s own stated human rights principles and contributes to the protection of authoritarian regimes when they align with EU interests,” the statement added.
EU officials stood by the contacts, insisting the discussions were “technical” and focused on curbing irregular migration and accelerating deportations.
The outreach comes as the EU begins rolling out a sweeping rewrite of its migration rules, which started implementation on Friday.
Between 2013 and 2024, EU countries received around a million asylum applications from Afghans, according to the EU Agency for Asylum.
“It’s no option not to talk to these people in order to improve the situation,” said Magnus Brunner, the EU’s commissioner for migration.
Yet campaigners argue that even narrow engagement risks conferring legitimacy and strengthening the Taliban internationally.
“Taliban are good at gaining from these negotiations without making any concessions,” Fawzia Koofi, Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly before its collapse as the Taliban seized power, told France 24.
“Because they don’t have anything to lose,” he added.
Ms Koofi, who survived two assassination attempts, said: “It’s us, the people of Afghanistan, the women of Afghanistan, that are losing.
“We are losing every day.”
