No Woman's Land

Between January and June 2024, women’s rights researcher Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri spent ten weeks traveling across seven provinces of Afghanistan to document the lives of women and girls under Taliban rule. The result, No Woman’s Land, is a photo reportage that captures a wide spectrum of lived experiences—from malnutrition and child marriage to quiet moments of resistance, creativity, and joy. As restrictions on Afghan women deepened following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, this project set out to record their realities with nuance and respect.

Since the 2021 regime change, Afghanistan has been undergoing an unprecedented rollback of Afghan women’s rights. What was once fragile progress in women’s education, employment, and political participation has been erased in just a few months. The goal of our project, No Woman’s Land, is to document this regression from the inside, using a human-centered lens that neither sensationalizes nor sanitizes, but instead shows the stories of the more than 100 women and girls we met in 2024.

A Systemic Erasure

Since August 2021, Afghan women have been increasingly excluded from public life. The Taliban’s policies have barred them from education beyond grade six, prevented their access to universities, and restricted employment across most sectors. Women have also been forbidden from entering parks, gyms, public baths, and beauty salons, and are required to travel with a male chaperone. A new morality law effectively silences them in public, and forces them to cover their faces.

For many women, these restrictions aren’t even the worst: since August 2021, the country has been facing an economic crisis that makes most Afghan families struggle to put food on the table. The suspension of development aid, the freezing of the Afghan Central Bank’s assets, and broad sanctions—all intended to pressure the Taliban—have primarily harmed women and girls.

In Nangarhar, a province near the Pakistani border, for instance, we met Muska, 14. She is what the Afghans would call a moon face, a sign of beauty in this part of the world. Muska and her family are returnees from Pakistan, pushed back by police harassment. Born in Pakistan, Muska used to go to a madrassa there, and learned to read and write. When her family returned to Afghanistan, they struggled to find a house, to find employment, and to feed their children. Without networks, lost after more than a decade abroad, and amid a crisis affecting the whole country, returnees struggle even more than the average Afghan. Unemployed and in debt, their parents accepted their landlord’s offer: to marry off Muska to his son in exchange for a well and solar panels, the equivalent of a few hundred dollars. Muska tells us her story neutrally: in Pashtoun culture, it is not uncommon to marry young, and getting married is seen as an achievement. Child marriage has always been a reality in Afghanistan, both culturally and as a way to obtain a dowry, but it exploded since 2021 and the start of the economic crisis, as a means of survival.

Women and girls suffer much more from this seemingly gender-neutral economic crisis in other ways as well. In a malnutrition ward, a nurse explained to us why they had more baby girls admitted than baby boys: when food is scarce, families will prioritize men and boys — who work and leave the house — over women and girls, who stay at home. She shows us a baby, Maryam, hospitalized for the third time, because her family doesn’t manage to properly feed her. Each time the nurses manage to get her back to a healthier weight before she can go to her home, where she’ll start losing weight again. At two and a half years, she weighed five kilograms when she was admitted, and managed to gain 500 grams. She should weigh more than 10 kilos, according to the World Health Organization’s weight chart.

According to OCHA, an estimated 22.9 million people—over half the population—will require humanitarian assistance in 2025, including nearly six million women. The policy decisions that led to this situation—from international funding freezes to the Taliban’s legal decrees—are not abstract, and their consequences are evident in clinics and homes across the country.

Halima’s Story

All the stories we encountered were similar in how they showed the impact of both international policies and Taliban policies on their lives: their education, their bodies, their mental health. Every single woman or girl we met suffers from them in their own way. Yet, it was crucial for us to avoid the reductive portrayals often seen in international media: since 2021, Afghan women are shown either bravely protesting in the street, or as faceless victims under a burqa. While women in burqas begging in the street are a reality, we wanted to show these women and their stories the way they deserved to be: with dignity and care.

One afternoon we met with Halima, 28, in her home in Dasht-e-Barchi. The room is sparse and cold, a bukhari (wood stove) in the middle attempts to warm it. Her hands are ink-stained and she holds the hand of her young apprentice, guiding her as she tattoos the arm of a teenage boy. The boy, Mustafa, 17, doesn’t flinch as the needle draws the contour of a woman’s face. “I got my first tattoo when I was seven,” he says casually. Three other teenage boys lounge on the toshaks, the low cushions that line the room, waiting their turn. Since the Taliban cut her lifeline by closing women’s beauty salons, Halima receives her clients at home, illegally.

In 2021, married, with a young son, she had a beauty salon—a space where, beyond getting their nails or eyebrows done, women could meet together, far from men’s eyes and uncover, laugh, and gossip. Her husband worked for the Ministry of Defense, a secure job given the continued violence in the country. “We never thought it could happen again,” she says of the Taliban’s return. “Not with him working for the Ministry of Defense.”

On the morning of August 15, 2021, her husband called her. “They’re here,” he said, “the Taliban are in Kabul.” She locked the doors of her beauty salon, and took a taxi home. Her husband met her there. They stayed inside, too afraid to leave. The next day, the Taliban tore down the banners outside of her salon—images of women were now forbidden. The 2023 Taliban’s ban on beauty salons struck a final blow. She moved the business underground, to her home, handing out cards discreetly in shopping malls, relying on word-of-mouth, and started to become more active in activist circles. On a good week, she might earn 2,000 to 3,000 Afghanis—around $40, a steep drop from before. Her husband, unemployed since the Taliban’s return, couldn’t help.

The impact of the Taliban’s directives against women’s abilities has been unmeasurable: forced to be accompanied to and from the office, prevented from sharing offices with men, forced out of the public sector (except health and education), from working for NGOs and the United Nations, the pressure is heavy on them to stay at home. The losses of preventing women from working were estimated by the UN in 2021, a few months after the fall, at an equivalent of up to USD 1 billion, or 5% of the country’s GDP. For women-headed households — widows, or whose husbands left to work abroad — the situation is even more dire.

On a cold day in January 2024, Halima went out to buy tools for her salon and hand out business cards. Her hijab was proper, but her friend’s wasn’t. The Taliban stopped them on the street and took both of them to the police station. There, they searched her phone and found photos and videos—evidence of her activism. They slapped her, punched her, beat her until her face was red and swollen.

That night, her husband collapsed. The arrest, the threats due to his old job, the years of stress, were too much. His chest pains, which he’d complained about for years, took him, and he died of a heart attack before midnight. Halima told us this story on the eve of the 40th day after her husband’s death, a sacred time in Shia Islam. Now, Halima is alone, with the weight of her children, her business, her activism all falling on her, and no time to grieve or lament.

“I Keep Fighting”

The first few months after August 2021—activists and women fighting for their rights, demonstrating, complaining online, complaining to the Taliban — were relatively tolerated. Since then they have been increasingly violently repressed, crushing any public form of protest. Women activists are arrested, detained, and beaten. The social sanction is as violent: sexual abuse has been reported in detention, and after women are released, whether or not they have been assaulted, are often rejected by their families and their communities.

“Things aren’t good,” Halima says simply, yet she is still connected to other activists, hosting programs in secret, organizing women who have lost their right to education, their right to work, their freedom. “Many of my friends and sisters can’t get an education,” she says. “That’s why I keep fighting.”

Blending Documentation with Hope

While meeting with Halima, we followed our security protocols to ensure her safety. Working in Afghanistan also came with risks, especially for the women we met: by meeting with us, these women were taking risks, and so their security — as well as the security of our driver, and other people working with us – was central to all the decisions we made: how to communicate, when and where to meet, etc. In the case of Halima, we were introduced by a common acquaintance, who vouched for us, which helped establish trust. We met in her home, where she felt most comfortable. We explained our project, how the photos would be used, including the fact that they would be published online, meaning they would be accessible by anyone with a smartphone. It’s only by sharing frankly the risks associated with the project that we could ensure their consent was truly informed. Once photographed, Kiana showed her the photos she had taken of her: a close up of her hands holding her late husband’s ring, or a portrait of her as a silhouette against her window, making her un-identifiable and thus protecting her. Many of the photos of women taken for this project play with light, fabric, details, symbols, and silhouettes to ensure beautiful portraits while not endangering them. After the interview was over, we stored her story separately from her photo, and separately from her contact information.

In some cases, we confronted difficult ethical choices. When a woman agreed, or even requested, to be photographed showing her face, should that image be published, and how—knowing that what is safe today may not be in six months? We leaned toward caution, weighing the longer-term implications over the short-term impact. In a few cases, this meant pulling powerful portraits from publication, preserving the safety of the subject above all else.

On a different afternoon in the beginning of spring, we sat with teenagers in an art gallery, a place where they retreat to spend a quiet hour practicing drawing skills with the guidance of their teacher, Fatimah. We met these teenagers several times over six months, which allowed us to build trust and thus to obtain access. We joined them for birthday parties, in their homes, in a café. This was possible because we had the luxury of time: the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, that made this project possible, gave us six months to produce our reportage, a rare occurrence in today’s journalism field.

In another instance, repeated visits to a maternity ward in Zabul in the conservative South of the country, helped us blend into the environment, enabling Kiana’s camera to become less intrusive over time, and enabling more relaxed interviews and anecdotes, collected late at night.

From spending time with these teenagers, another idea was born: we started collaborating with Fatimah and her students to produce art that would reflect their now out-of-reach dreams: after being photographed, they were handed prints of their images and paintbrushes, encouraged to illustrate their dreams and aspirations directly onto their own portraits. The result was a series of unique pieces that blend documentation with hope.

Similarly, we became creative: where photography was impossible—such as at wedding parties—sketches were used. In other cases, visual storytelling was complemented by intergenerational video conversations, later to be used in exhibitions.

We are now concluding the project, turning it into both a website, so that anyone around the world can access these stories, and into a photobook. While No Woman’s Land does not aim to directly influence policy, we hope to show that behind these policies, drafted in Washington, Brussels, or Kandahar, stands a girl who cannot go to school, a mother who cannot feed her children, or an activist imprisoned for fighting for her rights. It serves as both memory and warning, archive and testimony, created in the hope that one day, change will come, again, and that then, people will read these stories and wonder: how could we have tolerated this ?

Mélissa Cornet

Mélissa Cornet is a women’s rights researcher who lived in Afghanistan from 2018 to 2024. She conducted fieldwork across a dozen provinces, documenting the impact of Taliban rule on Afghan women and girls. She has published widely on women’s economic empowerment, mental health, and access to aid. A recognized expert, she’s been featured by the BBC, The Guardian, and Frontline. In 2024, she co-won the Carmignac Photojournalism Award with photographer Kiana Hayeri.

Kiana Hayeri

Kiana Hayeri is an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist whose work explores migration, identity, and adolescence in conflict zones. She lived in Kabul for nearly a decade. Her accolades include the Robert Capa Gold Medal, James Foley Award, and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award. A TED Senior Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, she regularly contributes to The New York Times. In 2024, she was the co-laureate of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award. 

Learn more about the project at www.NoWomansLand.com

You can follow Kiana’s work on Instagram at @kianahayeri and Mélissa’s work at @melissacrt