This brave journalist and young women like her are bearing the brunt of the failed democratisation project: ‘Hope is fading’

In the final days of the Afghan republic – in defiance of a looming takeover by the Taliban – the Hazara journalist Mani sang revolutionary poems in public in Kabul about women, freedom and justice. Now she is on the run, waiting for the Australian government to grant her a humanitarian visa.

It’s three years since Australia pulled its final troops out of Afghanistan. Their presence over two decades saw the country emerge from the ashes of civil war, embrace a relative peace and a fragile democracy before falling back into the darkness of fundamentalism under the Taliban.

This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.