In her recent interview with Australian ABC News, young Afghan legal scholar “T” gives a horrifying account of small children dying at the gate of the Kabul airport after a weeklong holdup under a scorching sun. Before escaping to Australia back in August, T, together with faculty of Melbourne’s Monash University, ran an international webinar on peace and human rights from the Afghan city of Herat.

As we watch Taliban leaders move from caves to government offices, educational institutions throughout Afghanistan have fallen into a survival mode. They have taken down their websites and destroyed documents incompatible with Sharia law. Mohammad Ashraf Ghairat, the new chancellor of Kabul University installed by the Taliban, has referred to co-educational schools as “centers for prostitution.” In his first decree, Ghairat banned women from teaching or attending the university until a “real Islamic environment” was in place.