Five years after Western forces exited Afghanistan, the country is nearing total collapse.
I met Azalea Lehndorff over a decade ago. This motivated young University of Calgary medical student had an idea to build classrooms in Afghanistan for girls. She set an ambitious goal to build 100 classrooms.
From Better To A Broken World
Her first step was to motivate 5000 Canadians to raise $100 each through community organized runs. She helped build 70 schools and was on her way to more. Azalea was instrumental in helping turn Afghanistan toward women’s rights.
But that all ended five years ago.
Western Allies, including the US and Canada, turned control of the nation over to the Taliban and it wasn’t long before Afghanistan returned to being one of the worst violators of women’s rights in the world.
Girls are now only allowed to attend school up to Grade 6.
UNESCO reports that Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls and women are formally banned from secondary and higher education.
And that is the least of the injustices.
Harriet Barber tells the heartbreaking story of a mother in the poorest section of Kabul, Afghanistan who had to marry off her eldest teenage daughter so that her family would not die of hunger. That was two years ago and now the family is back on the brink of starvation and facing the same horrendous choice with their two younger daughters.
Afghanistan was one of the countries that suffered severely when the US Administration shut down USAID in 2025.
Photo by Wanman uthmaniyyah on Unsplash
Suffering
Barber reported in The Guardian,
“The fighting that once dominated international headlines has largely faded from view, but for millions of Afghans the crisis has only deepened. Nearly half the population requires humanitarian aid and more than 14 million people are expected to face acute food insecurity this year, while rights have been mercilessly restricted, women systematically erased from public life and millions of deportees forced back to an economy unable to absorb them.”
(Excerpt from “Five years into Taliban rule, Afghanistan plunges into a state of collapse”)
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