As Kabul falls, the burqa shops get busy and young women fear for future

 'Afghans are done being victims. Afghan women will not hide. We will not be afraid,' a lecturer tells the Taliban on Twitter.

As the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday, university lecturers gathered their female students for some final goodbyes. Telling the shocked young women “we may not meet again,” the lecturers, along with everyone else, were evacuated, and the universities, along with schools, offices, and shops, were shuttered.

I spoke by phone with Aisha Khurram, one of those students whose academic dreams have been cut short. There are thousands more like her. The 22-year-old is in the final semester of her international relations degree at Kabul University. With just two months left, she says, “now it seems I will never graduate.” Her monograph was on United Nations Security Council reforms and how they’ll affect special missions in countries like Afghanistan. Just one more thing the world will be deprived of now the Taliban is back in power.

In Herat, the country’s third-largest city, which fell to the Taliban on Thursday, girls who showed up at their universities were turned away, Khurram says. “The education system is collapsing.”

There is, however, one business that is booming. In the provinces, burqa shops are reopening and the thick, blue garments that cover a woman’s body from head to toe — the repressive symbol of the Taliban’s previous rule — are becoming an expensive, must-have item. Though not for everyone.