Afghan women are terrified now that the Taliban have regained power

"I'm sitting here waiting for them to come," said Zarifa Ghafari, mayor of Maidan Shar, one of the few Afghan cities with women at the helm.

“There is no one to help me or my family.

I'm just sitting with them and my husband.

And they will come for people like me and kill me.

I can't leave my family.

And anyway, where would I go? "

Ghafari told a British outlet that he fled the country on Sunday when the Taliban began, city by city, to seize control of this Central Asian country after the chaotic withdrawal of US military troops after 20 years of fighting against extremists.

The dreams and ambitions of thousands of Afghan women collapsed in a matter of days.

In its place now there is terror and helplessness.

Afghanistan has been at war for decades, even before the United States entered the country to fight the Taliban and extremist forces since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

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For the previous five years, the fundamentalist group ruled the country.

During that time, he

prohibited girls from education and women the right to work, and even refused to let them leave their homes without a male relative

to accompany them.

The Taliban also carried out public executions, cutting off robbers' hands and

stoning women accused of adultery.

Ghafari, 27, has been Afghanistan's youngest mayor since 2018 and the first woman to hold the post in the conservative city of Maidan Shar in Wardak province.

As the Taliban began to resurface, Ghafari was put in charge of the welfare of soldiers and civilians wounded in terror attacks, at the Defense Ministry in Kabul, the capital.

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There have been no confirmed reports of measures as extreme as what happened in the 1990s in the areas that the Taliban recently seized.

But it was reported that some militants seized several houses and

burned at least one school.

In a park in Kabul, transformed since last week into a shelter for displaced people, some families told

The Associated Press

news agency

on Friday that girls returning home in the northern province of Takhar were

detained and tied up for wearing "revealing sandals".

Zarmina Kakar, a women's rights activist, cries during an interview in which she talks about the fear that women feel now, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Friday, August 13, 2021.AP / Mariam Zuhaib

The Taliban's chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, promised on Sunday that they would protect the lives of women and their opponents.

Mujahid said the fighters "will stand by at all entrances to Kabul until a peaceful and successful transfer of power is agreed."

In a separate statement to

NBC News

, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo, a Taliban spokesman said that fighters entering Kabul were disarmed on instructions from higher-ups.

The advance of the Taliban and the collapse of the government sent thousands of civilians fleeing their homes and seeking refuge, both from combat and the return of the ultra-conservative Islamist regime.

[Chaos at Kabul Airport: Hundreds of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban after US withdrawal]

Zahra, a 26-year-old woman from Herat, the country's third-largest city, had tears in her eyes as she thought she might not be able to go back to work, she told AP;

that her 12-year-old sister will no longer be able to go to school (“she loves to learn,” she said);

that his older brother will not be able to play soccer;

or that he will not be able to play the guitar freely again.

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Zahra stopped going to the office and started working from home almost a month ago when militants were approaching Herat.

But on Thursday, the Taliban broke through the city's defense lines and it has been unable to work since.

Marianne O'Grady, deputy director of CARE International in Kabul, said

the gains made by women in the past two decades have been dramatic.

But he added that he does not see how things could go back to the way they were, even if the Taliban regain power.

"You can't uneducate millions of people,"

he told the AP.

If women "are locked up and cannot get out, at least now they can educate their cousins ​​and neighbors and their own daughters in a way that was impossible 25 years ago."

However, the sense of terror is pervasive, especially among women, as the Taliban forces gain more ground every day.

A displaced school teacher from Takhar province, named Nilofar, left, wears a burqa inside her tent in a public park in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021.AP / Rahmat Gul

"I feel like we are like a bird that builds a nest to survive and spends all its time building it, but then

suddenly and helplessly, it watches how others destroy it,

" Zarmina Kakar, an activist for the 26-year-old women's rights in Kabul.

Kakar was one year old when the Taliban first entered Kabul in 1996, and she remembered a time when her mother took her to buy ice cream, when the Taliban ruled.

Her mother was whipped by a Taliban fighter for exposing her face

for a couple of minutes.

"Today, again, I feel that if the Taliban come to power, we will go back to the same dark days," he said.

With information from The Associated Press and NBC News.