Women in Afghanistan are going through a nightmare under the Taliban rule after the regime decided to ban all education for them in the country and steadily stripping them of their freedoms over the past year.
The Taliban last week ordered women in Afghanistan to stop attending private and public universities effective immediately and until further notice.
They have banned girls from middle school and high school, barred women from most fields of employment and ordered them to wear head-to-toe clothing in public. Women are also banned from parks and gyms.
"Had they ordered women to be beheaded, even that would have been better than this ban.
"If we are to be so unlucky, I wish that we hadn't been born at all. I'm sorry for my existence in the world.
"We are being treated worse than animals. Animals can go anywhere on their own, but we girls don't have the right even to step out of our homes," a local women named Marwa told AFP at her family home in Kabul.
The 19-year-old had recently passed an entrance exam to start a nursing degree at a medical university in the Afghan capital from March.
She was thrilled to be joining her brother, Hamid, in attending the campus each day.
But now their futures have been pulled apart.
Dreams crushed
"I wanted my sister to achieve her goals along with me -- to succeed and move ahead.
"Despite several problems, she had studied until the 12th grade, but what can we say now?" said Hamid, 20, a student of business administration at a higher education institute in Kabul.
Several countries including India, the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom have strongly condemned the Taliban's latest step in its brutal crackdown on the freedom of Afghan women and girls.
In March, the Taliban barred girls from going to secondary schools.
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