22/07/2026
Today's A Mighty Community Pick: "Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind" by Karen Bartlett. In the two decades between the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001 and its return in 2021, a remarkable group of Afghan women earned law degrees, walked into courtrooms once closed to their mothers and grandmothers, and became judges -- presiding over cases of domestic violence, family disputes, and corruption that no Afghan woman had ever had the standing to weigh before.
By the summer of 2021, more than two hundred women sat on the country's benches, many of them having personally sentenced Taliban fighters to prison. Then, in August of that year, American forces withdrew, the government collapsed in a matter of days, and the men these women had sentenced began walking free -- with their convictions, and the names of the judges who had signed them, in hand. Almost overnight, women who had spent their careers building the rule of law became fugitives in their own country, moving from house to house, burning the evidence of their old lives, trying to escape before they were found.
Karen Bartlett, a British journalist who reported the story over years of interviews with judges in exile and judges still in hiding inside Afghanistan, reconstructs how a global network of women jurists -- led by the International Association of Women Judges -- mobilized to get as many of their Afghan colleagues out as they could in the chaotic weeks of the airlift, and what happened to the women left behind when the planes stopped flying.
Winner of the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the book pairs urgent reportage with a clear-eyed account of how Western governments encouraged these women's careers for twenty years and then abandoned them in a matter of weeks, and closes with the judges' own recommendations for the beloved country they were forced to leave. Highly recommended for adult readers.
"Escape from Kabul" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781620978733 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4vuLLVS (Amazon)
For the memoir of Fawzia Koofi, who survived being left to die in the sun by her disappointed mother to rise to become the first female Speaker of the Afghan Parliament, we recommend "The Favored Daughter: One Woman's Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future" for adult readers at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-favored-daughter
For the true story of Kamila Sidiqi, who built a thriving dressmaking business and became the sole breadwinner for her siblings when the first Taliban regime banned her from school and work, we recommend "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana" for adult readers at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-dressmaker-of-khair-khana
For Deborah Ellis's beloved middle grade novel about an eleven-year-old girl in Taliban-era Kabul who disguises herself as a boy to support her family after her father is imprisoned, we recommend "The Breadwinner" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-breadwinner
For more books for children and adults about the lives of girls and women under Taliban rule, and ways to help Afghan girls and women today, visit https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=34254
