Hamida lives in Hairatan, near the border with Uzbekistan. The 26-year-old was the only one of my Facebook friends in Afghanistan still online during Afghanistan’s 48-hour internet and telephone blackout that began on Monday, September 29.
She uses an Uzbek SIM card, she explained after I messaged her. Its data packages are both cheaper and harder for the Taliban to cut. “For 500 afghani I get 90 GB of internet,” she said, adding that Afghan companies usually charge 2,099 afghani for 50 GB.
Despite being connected, she could not reach her fiancé in Badakhshan. “We had planned everything for our wedding by phone, even buying things through video calls,” she tells Zan Times in a WhatsApp voice message on Tuesday. “But now I can’t reach him.”
From Monday to Wednesday evening, Afghanistan experienced its first total internet and telephone communication shutdown. The Taliban have not issued an official explanation, although spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid denied an Associated Press report that attributed the shutdown to “old fiber optic lines” being replaced.
Two weeks earlier, Taliban authorities began banning fiber optic services in Balkh province, saying the move was necessary to “prevent vices.” Other provinces soon followed.
“The Taliban’s moves to cut internet access harms the livelihoods of millions of Afghans and deprives them of their basic rights to education, health care, and access to information,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a statement on October 1.
The effects were felt immediately throughout Afghanistan. Flights to and from Kabul’s airport were cancelled. Businesses relying on mobile transfers and online communication were left paralyzed. After the internet was restored on Wednesday, a resident of Sheberghan in Jawzjan province, one resident recounted the experience to Zan Times: “We were completely blind, like people living in caves. … Banks were closed, government offices said their systems were down, and food prices went up.”
The shutdown struck hardest at women, who already face a sweeping ban on secondary and higher education and public employment. For Asia, a 20-year-old law student in Mazar-e-Sharif, the blackout abruptly severed her only access to education. “When the Taliban closed universities, I couldn’t accept that my studies would just end,” she says. “I enrolled online, and I was in my fourth semester.”
Her class includes 25 students from across Afghanistan. For two days, their screens were dark. “I can’t hear their voices anymore,” she says. “Once again, the Taliban have broken the bridge between Afghan girls and their dreams. We are alive, but we are not living.”
HRW documented similar experiences. A lecturer told the organization that of 28 students enrolled in an online course — including 18 women in Afghanistan — only nine were able to log in once the blackout began.
The shutdown also silenced communication between Afghans inside the country and relatives abroad who provide crucial financial and emotional support. Zohra, a 28-year-old who lives in Australia, calls her 65-year-old mother in Kabul every day. She also sends money for rent and medicine. “The last night we spoke, my mother was sick,” she says. “I told her not to worry, that I’d take care of her.”
Panic set in after she couldn’t reach her mother for two days. “I’ve cried so much. I can’t sleep. I’m breastfeeding my baby but my head hurts constantly,” Zarmena tells Zan Times. I don’t know if my mother had medicine or food.”
For many Afghan women, the internet blackout is not just about lost connections, it is part of a broader pattern of exclusion. Schools, workplaces, and public spaces have already been taken from women. Online platforms were among the last venues where they could study, work, and speak out. Now, even that fragile space is under threat.
For more than two years, Nargis, an 11th-grade student in Herat, has studied English online, keeping alive the dream of continuing her education. On the first day of the shutdown, she was in the middle of a weekly test when her connection suddenly dropped. “That moment was so hard and unbelievable for me,” she said. “For two days I was silent and isolated, unable to do anything.”
Her mother suffered such stress after losing touch with Nargis’s older sister in Germany that she fell ill. “She has constant headaches now,” Nargis says.
Online learning is the only measure of hope she has left. Nargis spent nearly two years battling depression and confinement after the Taliban closed schools to women. Now she fears that hope may be slipping away. “If the internet is blocked forever,” she quietly explains,“I will fall back into depression. But this time, there will be no escape.”
Ida Osman contributed to this report.
Atia FarAzar is the pseudonym of a Zan Times journalist.
