“Salaam, Hello, Are you there?” “Are we meeting for the protest today?” “Where?” These were some of the messages a 25-year-old press officer for an international company woke up to on a January morning in Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth largest city in Afghanistan. She had spent the past few months in a safe house with other Afghan women, making placards and mobilising for protests against the Taliban. She wondered who had sent these messages. Puzzled and scared, she called her friends to check if they had received similar messages. Some had, others had not, but the question remained. How did the sender know they were secretly planning an indoor protest that noon?
As they regroup to resist the Taliban regime, which seized power in August last year, Afghan
