Post Description

Filmed on the ground in Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power, a stunning new FRONTLINE documentary reveals just how rapidly the hardline group’s takeover has transformed daily life in Afghanistan — especially for women and ethnic minorities.

In scene after extraordinary scene from "Taliban Takeover," Peabody Award-winning correspondent Najibullah Quraishi, who was born and raised in Afghanistan and has covered the war there for two decades, documents the Taliban’s crackdown in real time.

“Despite the Taliban’s claims that it has changed, what I’ve seen in the early days of the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan looks a lot like the harsh and brutal Taliban of the 1990s,” Quraishi says.

Quraishi’s team films in Kabul as men who say they’re working undercover for the Taliban force women at a restaurant to leave; as a university student describes being whipped by the Taliban; and as leading women’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj finds herself unable to help a visitor who says her granddaughter may have been abducted by the Taliban.

“This is not the time to be sad, this is the time to be angry,” says Seraj, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021. At the same time, she tells Quraishi, she fears, “There’s nothing I can do.”