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New Yorker journalist Anand Gopal spent the last weeks and months of the U.S.'s ill-fated war in Afghanistan in rural Helmand province, interviewing local women. It's a very long article, so I won't post the whole thing in the topic. But I'll post snippets. The TL;DR: women only ever had rights in the cities, while rural women lived traditionally under the constant threat of military conflict and brutal local warlords and gangs(which enjoyed the active support of the U.S. and Afghan government, lol)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who arent related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, If you dont leave immediately, everyone is going to die.

I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. Is it true? she asked a friend whod accompanied her to the safe house. Could it be?

This passage is cute, use it steel yourself.

n 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmanda province the size of West Virginia, with few girls schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing womens rights to the valley. Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school, Shakira recalled. It was this way before my fathers time, before my grandfathers time. When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. We would look for Russian helicopters, she said. It was like spotting strange birds.

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village as if he were the President. Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dados men went from door to door, demanding a tax and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her familys living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if shed been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakiras father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.

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She/her