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In a bizarre and widely criticized development in global geopolitical discourse, a cohort of young Emirati social media influencers has sparked intense backlash after circulating viral videos claiming the Muslim Brotherhood is secretly plotting to impose an Islamist caliphate across Britain and the Western world through subversive public outreach. The conversation ignited earlier this week when a clip from Rauda Altenaiji, a self-described “thinker of deep truths” on platform X, spread rapidly across social media.

The edited video cuts together footage of Altenaiji and fellow Emirati influencer Ahmed Sharif Al Ameri during an interview with British commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti — who recently argued at an Oxford Union debate alongside far-right figure Tommy Robinson that the West should be inherently suspicious of Islam — with out-of-context clips of American streamer Sneako, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, actor Ben Affleck, and journalist Mehdi Hasan. In the video, Altenaiji claims the Muslim Brotherhood is carrying out a quiet “invasion” of the West, using seemingly benign tactics like public relations campaigns and inclusivity initiatives to mask its ultimate goal of establishing caliphate rule.

Al Ameri adds that the movement leverages accusations of Islamophobia to silence critics, cutting to clips of the three public figures using the term to reinforce the claim. The video immediately drew widespread mockery and condemnation from analysts, journalists, and social media users alike, with many pointing to the absurdity of linking mainstream public figures like Affleck to the Muslim Brotherhood. Pakistani journalist Moeed Pirzada was among the first to question the narrative, asking publicly: “Are all Muslim organizations and campaigns across the UK and Europe are Muslim Brotherhood? Are you saying there is no ‘Muslim stereotyping’ in many parts of the West?”

Andreas Krieg, associate professor in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, summed up widespread criticism by framing the campaign as a poorly executed information operation. “Throwing fellow Muslims under the bus for a few clicks and cheers from Europe’s Islamophobic Far Right… some in the UAE are happy to further tarnish their reputation in the Muslim world, in an ill-conceived and terribly executed information op,” Krieg wrote.

Both Altenaiji and Al Ameri have claimed they operate independently of any official Emirati backing, but observers have noted clear patterns linking the influencers to established right-wing networks in Britain and official Emirati foreign policy priorities. Journalist Zaid Jilani joked that “the UAE is usually better at propaganda than this,” while even Sneako, who was unexpectedly included in the video, expressed confusion over the claim he was part of a Brotherhood plot. “This is proof of how new I am to Islam; they’re now accusing me of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m not even sure what that — like what is that?” he said during a livestream.

Additional viral content from other Emirati influencers has further fueled scrutiny. A separate widely shared clip of Al Ameri shows him declaring he is “more liberal than young Americans” and arguing that more radical extremism originates in the West today than in Arab countries, in an interview with an influencer focused on interfaith harmony in Israel. Another high-profile video from Emirati influencer Omar Al Blooshi delivered an ominous warning directly to British audiences, stating that Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups have operated in British public life for decades.

A consistent throughline across all these influencers is their open, strong support for Israel, a position aligned with the UAE’s official diplomatic stance. Al Blooshi recently wrote on X that “Anti-Zionism has become a convenient mask for antisemitism old prejudice repackaged in the language of politics,” while Altenaiji and Al Ameri expressed pro-Israel views during their interview with Sacerdoti. Multiple influencers have also been directly linked to the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a right-wing British think tank that runs the anti-Muslim Brotherhood campaign “Ban the Brotherhood,” which has featured Altenaiji and fellow Emirati influencer Abdulqader Almenhali in official content.

The HJS itself has a well-documented controversial history: its director Alan Mendoza also leads the Jewish National Fund UK, which has donated £1 million to what has been described as “Israel’s largest militia” and counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who faces an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes from the International Criminal Court — as an honorary patron. Mendoza also serves as a senior advisor to Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party. One of the HJS’s original founders, Matthew Jamison, has since publicly denounced the organization as a “monstrous animal” and a “deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation.”

The emergence of this influencer campaign aligns with a broader trend of growing alliances between the UAE and right-wing political figures in Britain. Independent outlet Middle East Eye has previously documented the increasingly warm ties between Reform UK — a party that advocates for mass deportations of immigrants — and Abu Dhabi. Last year, far-right activist Tommy Robinson traveled to Dubai, where he claimed in a recorded video that he was visiting at the invitation of Emirati officials to discuss terrorist organizations in the UK, though no evidence was ever provided to support that claim.

To understand the UAE’s longstanding focus on the Muslim Brotherhood, it is necessary to look at the group’s regional role. Founded in Cairo in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the world’s oldest and most prominent movements advocating for political Islam. In Arab states where free elections are held, parties affiliated with the Brotherhood often win majorities or emerge as the largest opposition bloc. Analysts widely agree that it is the Brotherhood’s staunch opposition to autocratic rule, rather than its religious orientation, that has made it a key target of the Emirati government.

Abu Dhabi has long pushed for the Muslim Brotherhood to be officially banned in the UK, a lobbying effort that has so far been unsuccessful. In 2023, it was revealed that the UAE paid a Geneva-based private intelligence firm, Alp Services, to smear Britain’s largest Muslim charity, Islamic Relief Worldwide, by falsely linking it to the Brotherhood. To date, no independent inquiries or reviews have found evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood operates as a unified organization or wields significant disproportionate influence in British public life. Still, the vague, unprovable nature of the alleged threat has made it a useful tool for British right-wing figures to push sweeping anti-Islam narratives.

Unlike the reception the UAE may have expected, the influencers’ claims have been met not with widespread alarm, but with broad skepticism, mockery, and derision from observers across the political spectrum.

Five years have passed since the Taliban’s lightning offensive swept into Kabul on 15 August 2021, bringing the ultra-conservative Islamist movement back to full control of Afghanistan. Today, the country grapples with cascading humanitarian, economic and political crises, while the international community remains deeply divided over how to engage the ruling regime – a divide that has left Afghan women, already stripped of most basic rights, increasingly adrift and losing hope.

In a whitewashed basement workshop in a village south of Kabul, a dozen young women stir bubbling pots of cherries and plums, labeling glass jars of homemade jam to sell. Run by 47-year-old Afghan entrepreneur Najia – a child bride married at 14 and mother of nine – this small operation is one of the very few remaining spaces where Afghan women can still earn an income and build professional skills under Taliban rule. Most of the women working here, including Najia’s own daughters, would be pursuing university degrees or professional careers if the Taliban had not banned girls and women from secondary education and university enrollment. Even this limited opportunity is now being squeezed: new Taliban rules bar women from selling their own goods at public markets and trade fairs, forcing them to rely on male intermediaries to handle sales, with the regime justifying the restriction by claiming women fail to comply with rigid hijab requirements.

“The world has to talk to the Taliban in a different way because what it’s doing now just isn’t working,” Najia says. “The lives of Afghan women have to change because we’re losing hope.”

Her words cut to the core of the pressing global question five years into Taliban rule: what approach can actually deliver meaningful change for Afghanistan and its people, amid sweeping restrictions that have erased women and girls from nearly all of public life?

The debate over how to engage the Taliban has exposed deep rifts globally. Western nations have largely prioritized human rights conditions for any normalization, while neighboring and regional powers have moved ahead to strike trade, mining and energy deals with the regime, extending de facto recognition. Even within the Western bloc, there is no unified approach. Critics across the board acknowledge that current strategies have failed to shift the Taliban’s policies, but few advocate for full isolation: the United Nations estimates 22 million Afghans – nearly half the country’s population – depend on international aid to survive, and the nation has already been battered by overlapping crises: a crippling economic meltdown, repeated devastating natural disasters, cross-border clashes with Pakistan, and the recent influx of millions of deported Afghans returning to the already impoverished country.

Despite ongoing opposition attacks from armed groups based abroad and Islamic State insurgents, the Taliban has steadily consolidated its hold on power, growing more confident in its rule each year. Today, the regime collects taxes and negotiates major commercial deals with China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan, among other partners. While only Russia has granted formal diplomatic recognition, and the Taliban remains locked out of its UN seat, informal and de facto recognition is growing. More than 40 Afghan embassies around the world are now controlled by the Taliban, rather than holdouts from the previous Western-backed government it ousted.

“The West is losing the argument over formal recognition,” a senior former UN official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to their ongoing work in Afghanistan, told reporters. “There’s no doubt the Taliban would like to be recognised at the UN but it’s no longer as potent a bargaining chip as it was at the beginning.”

For the Taliban, the priority is now expanding diplomatic engagement rather than waiting for formal recognition. “We need to come closer diplomatically rather than talking from a distance if we want to make progress in our relationship,” Taliban chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in an interview in Kandahar – the movement’s de facto seat of power, where reclusive Taliban emir Hibatullah Akhundzada has built his base and issued hundreds of strict edicts, most targeting the public presence of women, which he frames as an Islamic religious obligation to protect gender segregation.

Five years on, the international community’s approach is evolving. The UN, which maintains a mission in Kabul, has shifted to a new structured negotiation framework called the Mosaic process, which addresses six core issues: human rights (including women’s rights), inclusive governance, counterterrorism on one side, and the Taliban’s demands for sanctions relief, unfreezing of seized Afghan assets, and formal diplomatic representation on the other.

“Engagement is slow, progress is incremental, and reversals are frequent,” the UN’s acting head of mission in Kabul, Georgette Gagnon, acknowledged. “But a stalled process is better than no process. Pressure has not worked so far, threats have not worked; our best chance lies in consistent and common messaging and collective action.”

On the ground in provincial Afghanistan, international aid agencies have developed pragmatic “workarounds” to comply with Taliban gender restrictions while still allowing women to work and keep projects running – for example, having women work from home, or in separate facilities from men. Aid workers say these incremental daily adaptations help preserve limited opportunities for women, even as they operate within the regime’s red lines.

“Everything in Afghanistan is relationships, and day-to-day that can help make things easier,” said Chris Kinder, chairman of British charity Afghanaid, which has operated in the country for more than 40 years. “The Taliban have their red lines and we, and our donors, have ours. We discuss approaches so both sides understand where they are coming from.”

But many Afghan women’s rights activists and human rights groups argue that unconditioned engagement has become a one-way street, with the Taliban making no meaningful concessions in return for greater global acceptance. A recent flashpoint came in June 2026, when the European Union hosted a Taliban foreign ministry delegation in Brussels for the first time since the regime returned to power, drawing widespread criticism that it amounted to “creeping normalisation” of the Taliban’s discriminatory policies.

Mahbouba Seraj, a 78-year-old veteran Afghan women’s rights activist who stayed in Kabul after 2021 to run shelters for women fleeing domestic abuse, announced she is preparing to leave the country after her last shelter was shut down by the Taliban in December 2025. Her repeated appeals to reopen girls’ classrooms have been ignored.

“These small windows that the world sees, the little openings here and there including secret schools for girls, are just meant to fool everybody,” Seraj said. Still, she argues the international community cannot stop talking – it just needs to talk with clear conditions. “They have to talk, but they have to make sure that when they sit down and talk, it’s not just a lot of people just filling the air.”

Five years into Taliban rule, Afghanistan has largely faded from global headlines, overshadowed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Many observers agree that real and lasting change will have to come from within the Taliban movement itself, rather than being imposed from outside. While a small number of senior Taliban officials have privately pushed back against the strictest edicts – most notably the full ban on girls’ secondary education – the emir’s rulings are treated as absolute, and the movement prioritizes internal unity over policy change.

Back at Najia’s jam workshop, framed training certificates – including some from the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development – line the walls, a testament to years of perseverance amid growing restrictions. A new social order, shaped by the Taliban’s rules, is slowly taking hold across Afghanistan, but many Afghans continue to push and pray for a different future, pleading with the world not to forget them.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a sunlit office in central Beirut, prominent British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah leans over a stack of patient files, his weekend operating schedule filled with names that tell a devastating story of Israeli military campaigns across Lebanon and Gaza. All 11 patients waiting for his care are children, each bearing catastrophic, life-altering injuries from ongoing conflict.

Among the cases he reviews are two siblings carrying unexploded shrapnel from the 2024 cross-border war that has only recently begun to trigger dangerous secondary complications. There is a young boy with a partial foot amputation in need of complex reconstruction, another who requires final work on an amputation stump to prepare for prosthetic rehabilitation, and a child with a severe elbow injury that will demand hours of delicate surgery to save the joint from permanent disablement. “And so on, they are all like that… catastrophic,” Abu Sittah told Middle East Eye in an interview.

One of those waiting for their next procedure is 12-year-old Fatima al-Jabal, the youngest of three surviving sisters who escaped death when an Israeli strike flattened their family home in the small mountain village of Libbaya, located in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, on March 7. The attack killed Zainab, their 10-year-old fourth sister, whose body was torn apart in the blast and never fully recovered. Their mother, who was severely wounded in the strike, later died of her injuries in a Beirut hospital.

Fatima survived, but she lost an eye, suffered a dislocated jaw and extensive foot damage that has already required multiple surgeries. Now, Abu Sittah plans to remove remaining shrapnel embedded in her face and back to stop recurrent, life-threatening infections.

Days before her upcoming procedure, a Middle East Eye reporter visited the three surviving sisters and their father, 60-year-old Hassan Ali al-Jabal, in their temporary two-bedroom hotel apartment in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, where they have stayed while receiving ongoing care at the American University of Beirut Medical Centre. The smell of caramelized onion hung in the air as Hassan cooked moudardara, the traditional Lebanese lentil and rice dish that is his daughters’ favorite. In the corner of the living room, the three girls, still in soft pajamas, sat shoulder to shoulder stringing blue and pink beads into bracelets and phone straps to sell for pocket money, snacking on barbeque-flavored potato chips. Leaned against the balcony wall, a folded wheelchair waited – a reminder that only months ago, all three girls relied on it to move.

When 16-year-old Malak, the eldest sister, instinctively tugged her lavender nightdress down to cover the extensive burns that scar her legs, Hassan gently reassured her there was no reason for shame. Malak suffered the most devastating injuries of the three surviving girls: a traumatic brain injury, multiple compound fractures across her body, and permanent disfigurement that left her reliant on round-the-clock care for months. After months of intensive physiotherapy, she has reclaimed small but vital pieces of independence. “I can now go to the bathroom on my own, so I have improved a lot,” she said, weeks after spending months in intensive care following the strike.

Fourteen-year-old Kawthar now walks with the support of a walker, but an external fixation frame held in place by metal pins drilled into her bone still stabilizes a finger on her right hand and her entire left leg. A thick scar stretches across half her face, a permanent marker of the attack.

“All three have progressed a lot, but they still have a long road ahead and it can take a long time,” Hassan said, as he stirred his pot of lentils and rice. He explained that each girl faces a unique, lifelong set of medical challenges: Kawthar’s leg requires months more of reconstruction to regain function; Malak still carries extensive unhealed back injuries from broken vertebrae, and spent two and a half months unable to move on her own, her skin shredded from shrapnel that required multiple skin grafts to repair. “It was like something was eating off her body because of all the shrapnel,” Hassan said of Fatima’s recurrent wound infections, common for blast injuries where shrapnel carries contaminants deep into tissue.

None of the three girls wanted to speak about the harrowing weeks they spent in intensive care after the strike. But when Hassan teased them about their contrasting personalities – Malak the responsible, caring oldest sister, Kawthar the quiet stubborn thinker, Fatima the rambunctious youngest – giggles filled the small apartment, and for a few minutes, the space felt like any other family home. When he began to recount anecdotes of their quiet life in the village before the strike, the moment of soft warmth held, until he turned to the day he dug his surviving daughters out of the rubble that had been their home.

The smiles faded quickly. A framed portrait of Zainab, decorated with painted flowers, sits on the mantelpiece above the girls’ shared bed. “There is no point in a nice picture,” Hassan said, his voice thick with anger. “People tell me that my daughter is in heaven. I want her here, with me, not in heaven. I raised her for 10 years.” This is not the first time Hassan has lost a family member to Israeli war: his brother was killed during Israel’s 1982 full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon, 44 years to the month before Zainab’s death. The pain of the past has blurred into the present, leaving him struggling to untangle the multigenerational tragedy that has destroyed his family.

For years, Hassan had built a quiet life in the Bekaa Valley village, nursing a dream to build four stacked apartments for his four daughters, so they would always live close to one another. He never once considered leaving Lebanon, he said, until the day the strike hit. Now, he wonders what the future holds. “Kawthar said no. She doesn’t want to live elsewhere,” he said. “It is nice in Lebanon, but you need a future. And wars keep happening. I am 60, so I have lived my life. I don’t know how long I have left.”

Malak, Kawthar and Fatima still long to return to the Bekaa Valley to see their old friends and the home they loved, even as they know nothing will be the same. Israeli military operations and demolitions continue across southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have repeatedly stated they have no plans to withdraw from territory seized during the 2024 offensive. “We used to love our lives before,” Malak said, her voice carrying a gravity no teenager should ever have to hold. “We were all good students in school… We will certainly go back, carry on, and love life. But, of course, things won’t be the same as before. We want to be a support system to each other and want to go back and divide the work in the house and be like our mum would want us to be.”

The al-Jabal sisters are just three of more than 400 children across Lebanon who have received care through the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, launched by the surgeon in January 2024 to provide free reconstructive care to child war victims in both Gaza and Lebanon. For decades, Abu Sittah – who resides primarily in London – has traveled to conflict zones to treat the most vulnerable victims of war, from the First Intifada in Gaza to the Gulf War, Yemen and Syria.

He says the pattern of pediatric injuries he is treating in Lebanon today is “almost identical” to what he witnessed in Gaza when Israel launched its full-scale military campaign in October 2023. As of August 2026, Israel has killed more than 73,200 Palestinians in Gaza since the offensive began, including more than 1,250 after a May 2025 ceasefire took effect, with thousands more still buried under rubble. Across the Lebanese border, more than 4,330 people have been killed by Israeli strikes since March 2024. Combined, more than 185,000 people across both fronts have been wounded by Israeli military action.

“These children were wounded when Israel bombed their homes… so all of their injuries are either a direct result of the blast wave – shrapnel injuries, burns and tearing of tissue – or they were pulled under the rubble and they have crush injuries,” Abu Sittah explained. “And you rarely get a child with a single injury. It is usually a head injury and a fracture and a burn and other things, and they are all severe.”

Nearly all of his young patients have sustained life-altering injuries that will leave them with permanent disability or disfigurement, he said, with roughly 80 percent requiring intensive care at the time of their first treatment. Saving a child’s life is only the first step of care; ongoing reconstruction will require an average of 12 to 16 surgeries before the child reaches adulthood, as growing bodies require repeated re-intervention: scar tissue and damaged tissue does not grow at the same rate as healthy tissue, leading to complications that require additional procedures as children age.

Even after the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that took effect on April 16, 2024, the number of injured children requiring care continues to climb, as previously undiagnosed complications emerge and delayed care becomes available. Lebanon’s already fragile, heavily privatized healthcare system has been pushed to the breaking point by the crisis, leaving NGOs like Abu Sittah’s fund to fill gaps in care.

For children like the al-Jabal sisters, a ceasefire cannot undo the harm already done, nor does it guarantee safety in the future. Abu Sittah acknowledges that the cumulative weight of working with such profound daily suffering is difficult to process, but he says action is the only antidote to despair. “I deal with it by seeing it within the bigger picture and by being grateful that I have ended up in a junction in my life that I am able to not feel paralysed and not feel like a spectator,” he said. “Being a spectator is probably the worst thing that you can do when you are watching this horror unfold.”

It has been five full years since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, a watershed moment that followed a sweeping territorial offensive launched as the United States and NATO withdrew their forces after 20 years of war. The withdrawal culminated in chaotic, widely documented scenes at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, where tens of thousands of Afghans crowded the facility desperate to flee the country ahead of the new regime’s takeover.

As the Islamist administration marks its five-year anniversary in power, the legacy of its rule remains deeply divided: while many Kabul residents acknowledge an end to decades of open conflict that shook the country, widespread frustration over persistent economic hardship, systemic exclusion of women and girls from education and employment, and international isolation casts a long shadow over the regime’s claimed progress.

For many ordinary Afghans, the most immediate improvement cited is the end of large-scale war. “Thank God, the past five years have passed in safety,” said 30-year-old Mohammad Qasim, speaking amid the country’s ongoing economic crisis. Like many Afghans, he emphasized that the Taliban’s primary unfinished task is addressing widespread youth unemployment, calling on the administration to open pathways to work and education for the country’s growing young population. “We, along with the entire nation, call upon the government to create employment opportunities for the youth and to encourage them to pursue education,” Qasim added.

The most contentious and widely condemned policy of the Taliban administration remains its sweeping rollback of women and girls’ rights. Though the group initially pledged to protect women’s rights following its takeover, it quickly implemented a ban on girls above age 12 attending secondary education, followed by a full ban on women’s access to higher education, citing its own strict interpretation of Islamic law. Additional restrictions have since barred most women from formal employment and required women to be accompanied by a male guardian for domestic and international travel.

The United Nations has acknowledged that large-scale conflict has decreased across Afghanistan since the takeover, but has repeatedly warned that durable stability and economic recovery are impossible unless the Taliban reverses its gender-based restrictions. “A reduction in conflict has brought tangible benefits for many Afghans and created opportunities to focus on recovery, development and regional economic cooperation,” the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) noted in a pre-anniversary statement. The mission added, however, that “the restrictions on women and girls impede Afghanistan’s recovery and its reintegration with the international community.”

This week, UN Women reinforced that warning, declaring Afghanistan is currently home to the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis. “Half a decade after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghanistan has systematically dismantled the rights of half its population, making it a global outlier with no parallel in the modern world,” the agency said, adding that the exclusion of women from public life, education, employment, healthcare and the justice system has only intensified over the past year.

For Afghan women’s rights advocates like Fazila Soroush, a 39-year-old Kabul-based entrepreneur and activist, the five-year anniversary is a moment to demand concrete action from the Taliban to reverse education bans that have sidelined an entire generation of girls. “We consider it essential that the officials of the Islamic Emirate who had announced the closure of schools and universities until further notice, now make a clear and practical decision regarding this matter,” Soroush said.

Across Kabul, the Taliban has moved forward with public preparations for anniversary celebrations, with street vendors selling the group’s distinctive white flag with black script, and workers painting pro-Sharia slogans on public walls, including messages that “The Islamic system has been achieved at the cost of the martyrs’ blood” and “Our commitment stands firm: Consolidation and implementation of Islamic Sharia.”

Taliban officials defend their five-year record, framing the end of decades of war as their core achievement. Molvi Hayatullah Mahajar Farahi, deputy minister for broadcasting at the Taliban’s Ministry of Information and Culture, told the Associated Press that in addition to delivering nationwide security, the administration has stabilized the Afghan currency, upgraded critical infrastructure, and established new industrial parks that have created new jobs for Afghans.

“Naturally, challenges and difficulties exist, yet we can highlight several accomplishments,” Farahi said. When pressed about the ban on girls’ and women’s education, Farahi declined to address the policy directly, instead noting that “the level of investment made in universities surpasses anything seen in the past.” He added that “the Emirate continues its efforts to further organize and improve services for our citizens in the fields of education and other sectors.”

Farahi rejected U.N. warnings that terrorist networks have reestablished footholds in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, dismissing the claims as “enemy propaganda, spread to portray the country as unstable.” On the issue of the Taliban’s ongoing international isolation, Farahi claimed the administration maintains working relations with roughly 40 countries, though to date only Russia has formally granted the Taliban government full diplomatic recognition. “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has fulfilled all the requirements necessary for official recognition. It is now up to the international community and others to step forward and take the appropriate action,” he said.

New U.N. data released this week underscores the depth of the educational crisis triggered by the Taliban’s gender ban. UNESCO estimates that 2.4 million girls are currently excluded from secondary education in Afghanistan — an increase of 200,000 from just one year ago. The restrictions have reversed 20 years of incremental progress in expanding educational access across the country, the agency said, noting that the crisis extends beyond gender exclusion: overall, 53% of primary school-aged Afghan children are out of school, and most schools lack basic infrastructure including clean water, sanitation and heating, with hundreds more closed due to frequent natural disasters.

Compounding these challenges, the U.N. World Food Program warns that child malnutrition has reached critical levels in one-third of Afghanistan’s provinces, and conditions are expected to worsen as international funding shortfalls force cuts to food assistance and other life-saving support for vulnerable households.

Even among Afghans who support the Taliban administration and welcome the end of open conflict, many are pushing for policy changes to address the country’s multiple crises. Dost Mohammad Khan, a 38-year-old Kabul resident who backs the Taliban, said the past five years have delivered the stability Afghans longed for after decades of war, but the country needs trained professionals from doctors to engineers to move forward. “We also call upon the Islamic Emirate to permit women to attend school under the sharia dress code and we urge the public to heed the directives of the Emirate also,” Khan said.