After Kabul fell to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, Western media assigned the crowd a brand new moniker: “Taliban 2.0.” Certainly, the Islamic fundamentalist staff that had dominated Afghanistan within the latter part of the ’90s — overseeing a theocratic regime that repressed girls, spiritual minorities and political fighters — promised to shape an “open, inclusive Islamic executive” and that girls had been “going to be very lively within the society.”
Danish photographer Nanna Muus Steffensen, 36, has lived in Kabul since 2019. Because the world media slowly became away, Muus noticed temporarily how the Taliban started to renege on its guarantees and roll out a chain of repressive measures, most commonly centered at Afghan girls. The caretaker cupboard put in in September used to be produced from hardliners — and no girls. That very same month, Afghanistan changed into the one nation the place women may now not attend highschool. And in Would possibly, girls had been ordered to hide their faces in public and to simply go away house when essential. It used to be, says Muus, “a downward spiral over a yr.”
Muus’ photographic paintings has explored the numerous tactics — some on a regular basis and a few life-and-death — those restrictions have altered lifestyles in Kabul. Fewer girls are observed at the streets, and the colourful clothes they as soon as wore has been swapped for darker clothes. Fewer girls are allowed to paintings, contributing to an financial disaster through which greater than 90 p.c of Afghans are affected by meals lack of confidence. The plunge of middle-class households into poverty manner many can now not have enough money to visit personal hospitals, inundating public maternity wards. And psychological well being problems are surfacing amongst a era of girls stripped in their skilled and social selves. “Their complete id has been taken clear of them — their plans, their objective, their long term, their goals,” Muus says.