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KABUL — For 22-year-old Simin, new clients come with the fear of arrest.
She instructs them to park several blocks from her house and to avoid the soldiers who patrol the area. Then, she said, the newcomers make their way to an unmarked door, announcing their arrival in hushed tones.
Inside, Simin runs a hair and beauty salon for women. It was a booming business until two years ago, when Taliban authorities issued a blanket ban on salons - accusing proprietors of "vices" that were "prohibited in Islam."
"I'm worried that the Taliban will find us, but I have no other choice than to keep running it," Simin told The Washington Post in Kabul. "It's our family's only source of income."
Simin never dreamed of running a beauty salon, let alone a clandestine one. When she graduated from high school in 2020, she hoped to become a heart surgeon.
But when U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan the following year and the Taliban regained power, the new regime began enforcing the world's most extreme form of gender segregation: banning female education beyond sixth grade, barring female public workers from government offices and dispatching morality police to ensure that women adhered to draconian rules governing their dress and movements.
The country's 12,000 beauty salons initially seemed exempt from the crackdown - among the only public spaces where women were still allowed to gather - and Simin seized the opportunity. Afghan brides, desperate for company and distraction, couldn't get enough of pre-wedding makeovers, she said. Simin and her sister could feed the entire family on their earnings, she said, including their unemployed father and brother.
But the thriving industry soon attracted the government's ire. In 2023, officials ordered women to shut down their salons. In a video statement that summer, a spokesman for the Taliban-run Ministry of Vice and Virtue said eyebrow plucking and the use of makeup and artificial hair were "not permissible under sharia law." Having to pay for brides' makeup had become a "financial burden on the families of grooms," he added.
"We had opened this salon with so much hope and love," Simin said. "There aren't any words that do justice to how I felt when we were told to close."
Afghan authorities have not explicitly stated what punishment women would face for violating the order, said Saif-ul-Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. But the U.N. documented several detentions of female salon owners who resisted the closures in 2023.
Pushed out of nearly all high-profile and highly paid positions, Afghan women are increasingly resorting to unskilled jobs with low wages, often behind closed doors, according to more than a dozen interviews. Most women spoke on the condition of anonymity, or on the condition they be identified by their first name only, fearing government scrutiny.
In a country scarred by four decades of war, where many working-age men are dead or disabled, women are the only or primary breadwinners for many families - and many are struggling in the shadows to make ends meet.
Sawita, 30, single-handedly supports her disabled mother and five younger siblings. Her father was killed in a Taliban suicide attack eight years ago. When the regime banned beauty salons, Sawita said, she was too afraid to keep hers running underground.
She works now as a leather tailor, teaching other women how to make bags and shoes in a basement in Kabul, but she said the pay is so paltry that her family was forced to move to a smaller place with only one bedroom. Even now, she said, she tenses up when she sees the morality police on the streets. And she still dreams of running her own business again.
"What I miss most about my old life is waking up early, reading the Quran, and then going to work," she said. "That was my definition of freedom."
• Working on the Taliban's terms
The Taliban made no secret of its intention to push women out of the labor force. In a 2023 interview, Deputy Labor Minister Din Mohammad Haqbin told an Afghan television channel that "95 percent of Afghans do not want their women to go to work," accusing the other 5 percent of being brainwashed by the West.
More recently, the regime has taken a more nuanced line - allowing women to work again without compromising on its gender-segregation policies. Women should work in "sectors that are specifically for them," Samiullah Ibrahimi, a spokesman for the Labor Ministry, said in response to questions from The Post.
Taliban officials have attended the inauguration of gender-segregated markets, where women can trade clothes, pottery and other goods. Women are also being encouraged to work in girls' schools, or in female hospitals and prison wards.
"A safe and secure working environment for women has been established," Ibrahimi said.
Some women said they have found a place for themselves in the new order. Fariba Noori, a 50-year-old female entrepreneur who coaches Afghan women on launching market stalls or starting businesses, said she hasn't faced interference from Taliban officials.
"They tell us to work," she said, "and they're cooperative."
But many women, including those who came of age under the previous, U.S.-backed government, said they still feel hemmed in. "I've stopped applying for jobs," said a former World Bank employee who has been unable to find work since the Taliban takeover. "There's no hope here."
In sectors where women are allowed to work, they still face serious hurdles. They need a male guardian to travel around the country. And the rules enforced by the morality police often seem vague and arbitrary, women said. Many businesses have simply decided not to take on the risk.
When police visited the headquarters of a radio station in Parwan province last summer, a 24-year-old female contractor was told by her colleagues to hide. Sent home later that day, she ultimately decided to resign, she said.
Every morning, she checks her email, hoping for an invitation to a job interview elsewhere: "I hope my prayer will be answered," she said.
• Vanishing prospects
Some women have turned to online businesses.
After 23-year-old Beheshta started selling cosmetics and jewelry in October 2023, she saw a surge in interest from female friends and others. Some reached out for advice on how to start their own online ventures.
But amid a broader economic downturn in the country, female-led start-ups have taken a hit, too. As foreign aid dries up - with the Trump administration having recently cut nearly all U.S.-funded humanitarian and economic projects - many fear a prolonged crisis.
For the first time since Beheshta launched her business, customers have started to argue with her about prices, she said. Revenue at her store has declined by about 20 percent over the past six months.
"Initially, I assumed it's my fault," she said, recalling days of despair. "But then I realized: Everyone is having the same issues."
Noori, the job coach, said dozens of funding applications for women-run ventures have been rejected by foreign donors in recent months. "All we want is to empower women to stand on their own feet," she said.
For Simin, that prospect appears increasingly remote. She said she's determined to seek asylum abroad, "to continue studying and to work towards my goals."