She Was Given 10 Minutes to Choose: Be Killed by the Taliban or Leave Her People Behind

Published by Netta Ahituv on Haaretz | December 26, 2025

Benafsha Efaf, an Afghan activist who built shelters for battered women, was in the Taliban’s crosshairs. She had 10 minutes to choose between ensuring her and her family’s safety – or staying behind with the women she’d been protecting.

Benafsha Efaf had just 10 minutes to decide whether to accept an offer to be extricated from Afghanistan. On one hand, she and her husband were in the Taliban’s crosshairs, and she feared deeply for the safety of her 8-year-old daughter. On the other, leaving meant abandoning her parents, her siblings, and her life’s work: creation of a network of 33 shelters for women suffering from domestic violence.

It was the hardest decision of her life, she says today, speaking from her new home in the canton of Zug, Switzerland. “Leaving one’s homeland is difficult even in regular circumstances,” she explains. “But to leave foryour own security, without so many women who need me – that was almost impossible.”

Efaf ultimately chose to remove her family from the Taliban’s grasp in Afghanistan and seek political asylum in Europe. Since then, she has not stopped trying to help the women she was forced to leave behind.

We meet in a building in Zug that once served as a large hospital and now houses 450 refugees. Efaf works there as a socio-psychological therapist. She lives in a nearby suburb, with her husband and daughter.

Born in Kabul in 1985, Efaf grew up in a relatively liberal family – at least in the sense that her parents believed girls deserved to pursue their dreams just as much as boys. When she was 7, Afghanistan descended into a brutal civil war that ended in 1996 with the Taliban’s rise to power. Under the group’s extreme interpretation of sharia law, it was women who suffered most. From childhood, they were denied basic rights: freedom of movement, education and personal choice. Afghanistan itself became internationally isolated, and poverty was widespread.

A turning point came after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban, and in 2004, when Efaf was 19, Afghanistan held its first democratic election. She recalls walking with her entire family to the polling station, savoring the sweet taste of freedom.

The country was still far from safe or stable, particularly for women, but the non-fundamentalist population entertained hope for a better future. Conditions gradually improved. Afghan society remained patriarchal and unequal, yet women were once again allowed to study, work, drive, divorce, play sports and go out unaccompanied. Female lawyers, judges, and politicians worked together to establish a ministry for women’s affairs and to prosecute men who committed violence against women.

 

‘Knowledge is power’
Efaf’s activism began early: At 16, she started teaching illiterate women how to read and write. “My students were all survivors of violence,” she says, during our meeting in Switzerland, “and from that time I understood that knowledge is power.” From that point on, she knew she wanted to become a lawyer and help women escape abuse. After completing her legal studies at Kabul University, she launched an advocacy program for Afghan women.

In 2010, Efaf joined Women for Afghan Women, a U.S.-based nonprofit that provided shelter, education and legal assistance to women facing violence. She advanced rapidly, becoming the organization’s manager at age 30. She oversaw five shelters in Kabul and 22 more across the country, as well as six shelters for children whose mothers were incarcerated.

In 2019 – what would turn out to be Afghanistan’s last elections – Efaf ensured that every woman in the shelters could vote safely. Some were escorted to polling stations; others cast their ballots in the shelters themselves.

Then, in 2021, the Taliban returned, and darkness set in. Following the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces, the organization seized control of the country once again. Anyone who had cooperated with Western institutions over the previous two decades – from diplomats to civil society activists to maintenance workers – was suddenly at risk of imprisonment, stoning or execution.

Overnight, girls’ education was limited to sixth grade. Women were barred from most jobs, forbidden to express themselves on social media, and, starting in May 2024, prohibited from speaking or singing in public. They were forced to wear the niqab outdoors and cover their hands with gloves. Since reclaiming power, the Taliban have issued nearly 200 new decrees, 113 of them aimed at suppressing women. The word “woman” is banned from the names of organizations, and the so-called virtue and morality police are empowered to punish women arbitrarily, including by means of public flogging. Efaf calls it “gender apartheid in its cruelest form.”

In 2024, Afghanistan ranked last in the World Happiness Report – a distinction it received again in 2025 – making it the most miserable country on Earth. The Taliban also compiled blacklists of women deemed symbols of “Western culture,” effectively marking them for death. Among them were Shekiba Timoori, a popular singer who appeared on a televised talent competition; Gulafroz Ebtekar, the first woman to graduate from Afghanistan’s police academy and serve as a station chief – touted as the height of the shattering of the glass ceiling in the period between the two Taliban regimes; and Fatima Serkat, leader of Afghanistan’s national women’s cycling team. Efaf’s name, too, by virtue of her role as a defender of women who sent many abusive men to prison, appears on this terrifying list.

The four women mentioned above and 163 other threatened women were ultimately rescued in two daring operations, by land and air. The effort was led by four Israelis, headed by Danna Harman, an American-lsraeli journalist who also wrote for Haaretz in the past. Harman had met some of the women in 2018 while reporting for The New York Times on Afghanistan’s female robotics team in Herat, a city in the western part of the country. Harman spent a few weeks with these talented women and formed a close bond with them, celebrating what then seemed like a promising future for Afghan women.

When the Taliban took over the country again, however, it was clear that the women were in mortal danger: They had won prizes and been celebrated in Western countries. They contacted everyone they knew outside Afghanistan, including Harman, asking for help in escaping before it was too late.

Harman decided to do everything she could to rescue them. She was joined by Israeli documentary filmmaker Roni Aboulafia and by Yotam Polizer, CEO of the Israeli NGO IsraAID. Polizer enlisted Sylvan Adams, an Israeli-Canadian businessman and philanthropist, who contributed both financially and by means of his extensive network of connections. Together, they established a rescue team operating out of neighboring Tajikistan, with the aim of extricating the women.

Displaying remarkable resourcefulness and determination, the team succeeded in what had seemed impossible. At first, they attempted an overland rescue, via the Tajikistan border. The group – 167 people all together, mostly threatened women and their families – traveled in three buses to the Kunduz District in northeastern Afghanistan. But someone informed on them, and
armed Taliban personnel surrounded what was supposed to be a safe house near the border.

The Taliban ordered all the men to come outside and began beating them. With the help of contacts within the Taliban and through bribery, the men avoided arrest, but it was clear that a land operation was no longer feasible.

Harman and her team, operating out of Tajikistan, then managed to organize an aerial rescue from the airport in Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan. The group made its way there, hiding at times along the route, and after a nerve-wracking journey finally reached the chartered plane paid for by Adams. After further logistical ordeals at the airport itself, the plane eventually took off, landing in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

“I actually met them for the first time at the airport in Dushanbe, after their very arduous days and weeks of hiding and being on the run,” Aboulafia recounted last week. “Alongside the great relief at their escape, there was also a very sad realization that their world had collapsed and that the future was unknown.”

Indeed, the ordeals did not end there. Several more months were required to obtain refugee visas for Canada and Switzerland, and in the meantime a temporary host country had to be found. Israel refused. “It’s absolutely shameful,” Harman said in one of the interviews she gave immediately after the rescue.

Albania agreed to take in the refugees until their status in the host countries was finalized. Later, the group also managed to extract the refugees’ families. Altogether,some300 Afghans were given a new lease on life.

The dramatic, tension-filled rescue is the subject of the new documentary film “Day Trip: Escaping the Taliban” – the deliberately misleading name Harman gave to a WhatsApp group in which she sent updates and instructions to people who were fleeing for their lives. (The film, in Hebrew, directed by Aboulafia, is available on the website of Kan 11, the state broadcaster.)

Harman has since left journalism and is devoting her life to working with refugees. Polizer continues to accomplish humanitarian miracles through IsraAID, and Aboulafia remains in close contact with the women, traveling whenever she can to visit them in the countries that have granted them asylum.

“Benafsha was forced to leave behind all the women she herself rescued in the shelters for victims of domestic violence,” Aboulafia notes. “It’s a decision that will stay with her for the rest of her life. But her abilities and courage – and those of other women like her, who managed to reach positions of influence in a society that was already conservative and oppressive – apparently prepared
her for it. When I saw her daughter with her at the airport in Dushanbe, it was clear to me that she had no other choice. Who among us would condemn their daughter to life under the Taliban regime?”

“Benafsha and the other women who appear in the film are, in every sense, a human elite. They have made extraordinary achievements in their fields, and many devoted their lives to the benefit of other women. I admire them. They lost everything, but I see how, slowly, overtime, they are finding meaning and purpose in the countries that took them in.”

There is a moment at the airport in Mazar-i-Sharif, minutes before takeoff to freedom, that Efaf will never forget. She was interrogated, she recalls, “and one of the Taliban said to the airport official, insisting, ‘Please find some error in this passport. I really want this woman to go back.’”

Fortunately, the official in charge of passport control recognized her from previous flights. He pretended to agree – saying that “these are very problematic people” – took the passport into a side room as if to examine it more carefully, and then returned and announced, “There is no problem.” A Taliban man then told her, “Go to hell. You’re not allowed to come back again.”

“In Switzerland I struggled to forget those words,” Efaf says. “I was deeply traumatized by the situation. It was very scary.”

 

Thanks to the dentist
Efaf could have left Afghanistan much earlier, she says – as soon as it became known that the United States was going to withdraw all its forces from the country. “I had the opportunity to leave,” she explains, “because I had admission from the Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., from Canada and from Germany. So there were five possibilities for me.”

But when push came to shove, she says, she could not leave, because so many women depended on her. When the Taliban first took over, she even contacted the authorities, hoping to persuade them to allow her to continue managing the shelters.

That was very brave of you, contacting them.

“Yes, it was a brave act,” she says with a smile, though her eyes betray the terror she felt. “We organized a committee to negotiate with them face to face [via Skype]. We told them: Our organization is nongovernmental and non-political, and it will stay like that, so let us do our work.” The shelters, they added, also helped the government by providing welfare services.

But the Taliban refused. “They didn’t call our places shelters, but ‘prostitution centers.’ It was heartbreaking for me to hear that, because our work was very need-based,” she says. “Afterward, one of them sent a message to my private phone number, which only my husband knew, saying that the Taliban even knew the color of the curtain in my bedroom, and that I should stop trying to speak with them. Then they gave me two options: either hand over the unmarried women to the Taliban, or find a husband for each ofthem.”

Efaf refers to the women in the shelters as “beneficiaries,” never as wards or victims. The terminology was a deliberate choice: These are women who were deprived of basic rights. I want to empower them, to tell them that they are entitled to demand their rights, not wait for them to be given. I don’t want to see them as victims, but as beneficiaries.”

Another threat to the women in the shelters came from their assailants, who were released enmasse from prison by the Taliban. These were men whose incarceration Efaf herself had helped secure in her capacity as a lawyer, and who were now suddenly free. Efaf and her team quickly checked which women could be placed with nonviolent relatives, as far away as possible, and helped them get there. They were able to smuggle a few of the women to Germany and others to Pakistan. Those who could not be sent abroad were transferred to a different province inside Afghanistan.

Once the women had been removed from danger, attention turned to the staff members: Six members succeeded in leaving the country; the rest returned to their homes and concealed the fact that they had ever worked for Women for Afghan Women.

In September 2021, Efaf realized that she had to save her family. That became clear when the Taliban arrived at one of the shelters in Kabul, a sign that the address of this protected location had been exposed. That same day, she received a call ordering her to report to a police station for questioning. She did not go to the station, but she did not go home either. Instead, she went to her sister’s house, where she signed the organization’s financial documents in an effort to complete all projects properly and ensure that everyone owed money would be paid.

From there, she moved through five additional locations before setting out for her parents’ home. A few days earlier she had developed a severe tooth ache, so on her way she stopped at a dental clinic she knew well. That stop probably saved her life: While she was at the clinic, her father called to warn her not to come home: Taliban personnel were there, interrogating her brother.

If this were a movie, the next scene would have ended up on the cuttingroom floor for implausibility. Moments after realizing that she had nowhere left to hide and that the Taliban were besieging her family, Efaf received a phone call asking whether she wanted to leave Afghanistan. She was given 10 minutes to decide, as the rescue operation was about to begin and there was a long list of people seeking to escape.

“He was someone from the world governing body of cycling. I don’t know who facilitated it, but my name was on the list of the Afghanistan women’s cycling team. I’m not a cyclist, but I was the lawyer for cyclists,” Efaf explains, noting that when a harassment case involving a cyclist arose, her name appeared on the team roster. (Harman and the Israelis worked closely with the Union Cycliste Internationale to extract as many women as possible.)

In the past, Efaf adds, before the Taliban takeover, she had been forced to leave the country several times for a few weeks because of threats from ISIS, after her nonprofit had rescued women from its fighters. “But then, at least, the Afghan government helped evacuate me if there was a problem.”

She always fled to the Netherlands, and always returned to Afghanistan once the danger passed. “The first time was very difficult, because my daughter was only 2, and I had to leave her in Afghanistan.” The last time was in April 2021; then, too, she returned to save the beneficiaries and her staff.

At what point did you realize that Israelis had rescued you? “I understood the moment we arrived in Tajikistan and met them. I am grateful.”

Asked how she ended up in Switzerland, Efaf says she was surprised that it was the first country to offer asylum; she had expected to go to the Netherlands or Canada. “After we spent seven days in Albania, a group of Swiss people came to our camp and told us they were inviting 28 of us to live in Switzerland. We were the first to leave Albania. They said to us: ‘We want you to feel safe with us. We want you to feel at home.’”

After spending their first 40 days in a refugee camp in Zurich, the refugees were distributed among different cantons. Efaf and her family were the only ones sent to Zug; most of the cycling team went to Zurich. “They stayed together as a community, and I’m very happy about that, because many of them were young women without their families.”

Efaf managed to get her parents and six siblings out of Afghanistan, and they are now scattered around the world as refugees. “It was terrible. I thought that although I survived, I had put my family in danger-that because of my work in Afghanistan they were no longer safe. While my father and brother were being interrogated by the Taliban, I called the German Foreign Ministry and told them what was happening. They were very kind. They evacuated my parents to Germany.”

Efaf is also engaged in efforts to extract other women from Afghanistan. In one of our conversations, she recounted emotionally that just that week she had succeeded in getting a young Afghan woman into Kazakhstan. “It wasn’t easy,” she says, sighing with relief. “She was highly motivated and wanted to study law, which of course is impossible. She switched to nursing, because that was allowed for women -but a year and a half ago the Taliban shut that option down as well.”

 

Feeling forgotten
Once all the doors to schooling were closed, the woman was at risk of forced marriage. “It’s hard for families in Afghanistan to support young girls, and nursing is almost the only solution,” Efaf explains. She sent the woman information about every scholarship opportunity that she could find, and the woman applied to many abroad. Eventually, she was accepted to study in Kazakhstan with a scholarship. “It took a great deal of persuasion to get her father to agree. In Afghanistan, if a woman doesn’t have the support of the men in her family – she’s finished.”

After many ordeals, the woman arrived in Kazakhstan not long ago and will soon begin her studies.

How did you adapt to Switzerland? “The first two years were really difficult. I think Switzerland is a nice country, and the human culture is wonderful- but I had to start everything from zero.” She could not practice law and had to learn German. She also taught herself English: “I’d never been in an English class.”

Efaf has been working for some time providing socio-psychosocial support to refugees arriving in Switzerland. The project, called ComPaxion, aims to reduce the trauma of refugeehood through therapy and conversations conducted in the refugee’s mother tongue – Dari, in Efaf’s case. She proudly shows us her therapy room.

To work as a therapist, she completed a special training course in German, and is now seeing the results. “It’s an approach where therapist and patient speak the same language, as equals. The results are amazing. The patients become proactive and take responsibility for their integration. I always tell them: The war may have taken our home, but not our powers or our skills.”

Do Afghan men agree to undergo therapy with a woman?

“When a man enters the clinic, I always wear the hijab, so he will feel more comfortable. They say it’s actually easier for them to cry with a woman than with a man, and they engage in therapy just like the women. Some prefer to sit on the floor, like in Afghanistan, rather than on armchairs.”

The project is considered a success. Initial surveys show a significant reduction in refugees’ reliance on state welfare services. For her work with ComPaxion, Efaf received Switzerland’s Ida Somazzi Prize for human rights, human dignity and gender equality, at a ceremony held in Bern. Efaf’s husband also works for a local human rights organization and neither of them relies on government support; they work and provide for their daughter.

Do you still consider yourself a religious Muslim, or has that changed in light of what women are enduring in the name of religion?

“I am religious, but the Islam I follow is very different from the dark Islam of the Taliban. The Islam I learned allows women to study and is not opposed to women’s rights.”

Within this Islamic framework, Efaf has become involved in another project: compiling all Taliban laws, decrees, ordinances and directives that undermine basic human rights. The list includes, for example, an order dated January 7,2022, banning the sale of coffee to unaccompanied women.

The compilation is carried out through acquaintances, colleagues and students still in Afghanistan, in cooperation with the United States Institute of Peace, recently renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. The goal, Efaf explains, is to inform the world about the horrors being inflicted by the Taliban. “I know the situation is worsening everywhere in the world,” she says, “but the feeling is that we, the women of Afghanistan, have been forgotten.”

Efaf is also analyzing the ordinances to identify loopholes that might benefit Afghan citizens. She has found two that could help women, however marginally: one requiring a woman’s consent to marriage, and another restricting polygamy. Moreover, she and other colleagues have launched a campaign to inform girls and women that if they face forced marriage or if their husband takes additional wives, they have the right to complain to religious authorities. “It may not help,” she says, “but it is still something that can be done.”

In addition, Efaf volunteers by teaching Afghan women – in a 12-session course online -what she calls “lawyering skills.” She knows the women will not practice law in Afghanistan, as it is forbidden. “It’s a mentorship. The goal is to give women a space to think, to participate. We work on how to write a lawsuit, a defense statement,” she explains, adding that instead of modern schools, the Taliban have now opened numerous madrasas – religious schools for boys – where “very restrictive rules” are taught. Her course is meant to counter this trend, however modestly.

Isn’t it dangerous for women to study illegally?

“One student told me it took her four months before she could turn on her computer camera. She needed permission from her family – from her eldest brother, second brother, third brother, and father. It’s very difficult. One day I tried to speak with the entire family. I understand their fear; a neighbor could report them to the Taliban.

“We start with four sessions on psychological health. Talking about psychological health in Afghanistan is stigmatized. After four sessions, they begin to feel some hope, and then do we start the legal material. I am also an example for them. I was a child when the Taliban first came to Afghanistan. We lost everything, but I tell them that we never lost our hope. They have an opportunity, with the internet, that we didn’t have. I am sure the day will come when we will restart Afghanistan.”