She was only able to put them off for so long until there she was, inside a police station in Kabul being interrogated by the Taliban. Sodaba Nazhand knew she had to be careful — not only was her personal safety at risk, but so was a clandestine operation she had started just months ago.
Nazhand’s operation involved something that wouldn’t typically be considered illegal: teaching. But she was secretly educating primary school–age girls and street children in defiance of the Taliban’s ban on educating girls beyond the sixth grade, which went into effect more than a year ago.
After three months of teaching a bunch of girls and street children in a nearby park in Kabul, Nazhand had put up a billboard in the area to encourage more students to enroll, which attracted the attention of the Taliban guards, who started interrogating her to find out what she was doing. Nazhand convinced them that she was offering religious lessons along with some basic education to street children.
It worked for a while. In the weeks that followed, her secret school for girls attracted more students, including the daughter of a Taliban commander from Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan who had never been able to go to school due to war and her father’s hardline ideology.
Eventually, though, she ended up at the police headquarters, where the Taliban guards interrogated her to find out if she was associated with any foreign nonprofit or agency.
“I told the Taliban that the class was only about educating street children,” Nazhand told BuzzFeed News. “Women or adult girls were coming only for religious education, not for school subjects.”
After she was released, Nazhand continued teaching in a park for three months before local volunteers found her a sheltered classroom area to combat harsh winter weather.
