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       Afghans hold a secret wedding in Herat in March of 2001, when the Taliban's version of Islamic law made it illegal for men and women to dance together. The U.S.-led invasion later that year would drive the Taliban underground and give Afghans greater freedom. Twenty years later, U.S. troops are gone and the Taliban are in power again.

       Photography by Lynsey Addario

       Lynsey Addario started photographing women living under the Taliban in the spring of 2000. The religious-political movement had almost complete control of the war-torn country, which had been ravaged first from the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, and later from the infighting of various Afghan factions within.

       “I had never been to a hostile country before, and photography of any living thing was illegal under the Taliban,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning, self-trained photojournalist, who was 26 at the time. “I was able to get a visa to travel to Afghanistan, but I had to put my cameras in a bag and sneak around.”

       Despite having to do her work covertly, Ms. Addario thought she could go into spaces where there were only women. Of course, she had to get permission from the women themselves, but the real go-ahead came from the women’s husbands, fathers or brothers. “As a photographer, I have to make sure that I’m not endangering the lives of the women I photograph, so I have to be meticulous,” she says. “Sometimes it took weeks to get permission to shoot one photograph.”

       Now, as American and allied troops have pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken hold of the country once again. Not only are there concerns that the gains women have made in the past two decades will disappear, but there is fear of a bleaker fate for the women and men who aided Western troops and journalists.

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       Members of Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic and religious minority study in 2010 at Marefat School on the outskirts of Kabul. The school was co-ed until 2006, when the Karzai government's education ministry segregated it.

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       Afghan medicine before and after the Taliban's fall: At left, female medical staff who were permitted to work by the Taliban stand in the maternity ward of a Kabul hospital in 2000; at right, a male surgeon from Ethiopia (centre left, in a green cap) teaches female staff at Kabul's Malalai Maternity Hospital.

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       When these women graduated in Kabul University's class of 2010, they were among a minority of Afghan women to get a full postsecondary education. The graduation was held under tight security at a Kabul hotel because of an upsurge in attacks.

       Ms. Addario, whose own life has been on the line more than once during her career – including when she was ambushed by the Taliban during a U.S. offensive in Afghanistan in 2007, and when she was one of four New York Times journalists kidnapped in Libya in 2011 – has turned her focus to the Afghan women who helped her behind the camera.

       She has been working with National Geographic photographer Stephanie Sinclair and her organization Too Young To Wed, which Ms. Sinclair founded when she was covering child marriage around the world, to try and evacuate as many of her translators and other Afghan women who had assisted her as possible.

       “When the Taliban took over, our immediate concern was for these women,” she says. “We joined forces to figure out how we can pressure organizations we’ve worked with to help get them out.”

       As a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world, Ms. Addario covered many gains for Afghan women in the past 20 years since the U.S. and allied occupation of the country. “Not only were there girls and women going to school and university becoming doctors and lawyers, there were women working in parliament to draft the constitution. Women were in peace talks with the Taliban.”

       When Ms. Addario and Ms. Sinclair went public with what they were doing to try to help their translators and other Afghan women escape, other journalists came forward requesting evacuation aid for their own translators. “The list has grown to 150 people, including human-rights activists, who have already gotten knocks on their door from the Taliban, and their immediate families. “No one wants to leave behind their mother or brother,” Ms. Addario says.

       Bureaucracy – combined with a race against the clock – has been complicated, to say the least. The group has raised enough funds to resettle the women and their families, but first need to get them to the airport, and then find countries that will accept them, Ms. Addario says.

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       Afghan women train in Kabul in 2009 to get ready for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, where women's boxing debuted as an official sport. For these athletes, it was a triumph simply to get their families to sign on to their idea of their daughters taking part in sports.

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       At left, DJ Rokhsar Azamee works a TV call-in show that features song requests in 2009; at right, parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi sits in the Kabul legislature in 2010.

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       Female officers in the Afghan police practice firing AMD-65 rifles under the supervision of Italian military police from the local NATO troops. Of 100,000 officers in the police force at that time, only about 700 were women.

       What will happen to all women left behind in Afghanistan is the question that haunts Ms. Addario. The Taliban have said they will allow women to work and study according to their interpretation of Islamic law, but what this actually means is unclear.

       The new Taliban Ministry of Education recently opened middle and high schools for boys but so far it has given no indication of when girls might be able to go back to their classes. Female university students will only be allowed to study in gender-segregated classrooms and they must abide by a strict Islamic dress code.

       “Their only track record is the one they had the last time they were in power, and that was pretty grim,” Ms. Addario says. “They seem to preface everything within the framework of sharia law, which can be interpreted by various levels of extremity. They say a girl can go to school, but that could mean that she can only study the Quran. Or, a girl can go to school but when she gets her period, she may have to go home to get married. This was still happening, particularly in many conservative areas in the south, such as Kandahar.”

       Ms. Addario and Ms. Sinclair continue to work with local partners to try to assist the women on their list. Ms. Addario takes solace in the fact that some women have been able to escape, such as Saida, a translator she knows who also worked with Save the Children. Two weeks ago, Too Young to Wed posted a desperate voice memo from Saida on social media after she survived a stampede at the Kabul airport. Shortly afterward, she was evacuated from Afghanistan. “Saida made it to Qatar.”

       Escape from Afghanistan Mark MacKinnon tells the story of how he and other Canadian journalists saved their former translators in the nick of time, with help from Ukraine.

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