Zarifa: A Woman's Battle in a Man's World

Zarifa Ghafari was mayor of Maidan Wardak, a province of Kabul, Afghanistan and escaped from the Taliban in August 2021 to seek refuge in Germany. Ghafari was included by the BBC as one of the '100 most inspiring and influential women in the world' in 2019, received the International Woman of Courage Award from the US State Department in 2020 and the Oxi Day Foundation Award for Courage in 2021. She runs a foundation for women in Afghanistan.

Hannah Lucinda Smith is the author of Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey and The Times correspondent in Turkey, where she has covered conflicts, a coup attempt and the rise of controversial president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She has reported from inside rebel-held Syria, on the front lines of the battle against Isis in Iraq, and joined migrants on their journey to Europe in 2015. She has also worked also for the BBC, the Atlantic and the Spectator, and was awarded a Pulitzer grant to write for Wired magazine.

I am one of the lucky ones. I got out of Afghanistan alive when the Taliban retook the country. Millions of others did not - they are now living under one of the world's most repressive regimes, with any progress that was made for women over the past twenty years being brutally reversed.

Every day, I yearn for my motherland. Now it is my duty to make sure that the world knows what is happening to women there, and what we must do to change things for them. Zarifa Ghafari was three years old when the Taliban banned girls from schools, and she began her education in secret.

She was seven when American airstrikes began. She was twenty-four when she became mayor - the only female mayor in the country - of Maidan Wardak, Kabul. An extremist mob barred her from her office; her male staff walked out in protest; assassins tried to kill her six times.

Finally, they killed their father. Ghafari stood her ground. She ended corruption in the province, promoted peace and tried to lift up women.

When the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Ghafari had to flee. This astonishing memoir describes the work she did, the women she still tries to help as they live under Taliban rule and her vision for how grassroots activism can change their lives and the lives of women everywhere.