This week, the Taliban began cutting Wi-Fi access to provinces across Afghanistan.

The New York Times cited two Taliban officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, who confirmed that orders for the Wi-Fi ban came from Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. Multiple Taliban officials have said Haibatullah believes that the internet is being misused and promotes immorality.

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The reach of the ban is under hot debate. On Tuesday, the head of the Afghan Embassy in Qatar, Suhail Shaheen, said that despite contradicting reports, Kandahar maintained Wi-Fi access. He confirmed that Mazar-i-Sharif, a large city in the Balkh province, has no Wi-Fi access but functional cellular service.

The outlet found that Access Now showed a decline in internet traffic in seven of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces as of Monday. One source inside Afghanistan told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that Wi-Fi was cut in Balkh, Badakhshan, Baghlan, Nangarhar, Laghman, Konduz, Kandahar, and Herat.

However widely the ban extends, losing Wi-Fi access presents a serious blow to groups that provide secret online education to Afghan women.

Rahmani, who spoke to the Washington Examiner on the condition that she be identified by a pseudonym, started Innovative Learning Academy in 2023 to provide free online education to Afghan girls. At its height, the academy reached about 1,800 students. Until this week, 800 girls were enrolled in online classes taught by volunteers.

Scheduling interviews inside Afghanistan is always difficult, given the internet and electricity blackouts. Despite picking an ideal moment to skirt those matters, the quality of Rahmani’s service was poor when she connected with the Washington Examiner.

“I can’t work anymore,” she said. “The internet connection is so bad right now.”

Rahmani said internet access was a lifeline for girls who were sidelined by the Taliban’s ban on schooling for girls after the sixth grade. Even when the Taliban began banning books inside the country, girls “didn’t lose their hopes,” Rahmani said. There “was only one book that was in our home. It was Wi-Fi connection. It was internet. It was online classes,” she explained.

Rahmani said she believes suicide “will be a common thing in Afghanistan after the ban” because the Taliban have taken away the final place “that [women] were allowed to go.”

Amid the growing sense of desperation, another Afghan woman is also leading the charge to find ways around the Taliban’s internet ban.

Zuhal Bahaduri was raised in California to Afghan immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1990s. The co-founder and director of refugee support organization 5ive Pillars and a senior business analyst, Bahaduri told the Washington Examiner that she hardly slept after learning about the Taliban’s Wi-Fi ban. Over the days that followed, Bahaduri sought support from a well-connected adviser and launched Open Net Afghanistan, which has both short- and long-term proposals for working around the Taliban’s restrictions.

First on the docket for Open Net Afghanistan is petitioning Starlink to grant Afghans humanitarian access to internet services, as it has done previously in Ukraine and Iran.

“Afghans deserve the same digital lifeline,” Bahaduri argued.

Next comes the creation of “VPNs and mesh networks that will help Afghans bypass the censorship and share scarce connectivity across schools, NGOs, and communities,” she added.

In the long term, Bahaduri said educating Afghans about digital literacy resilience is important “to make sure all Afghans know how to use these tools safely.” Given that the Taliban often check Afghans’ phones at checkpoints around the country, hiding evidence of using internet workarounds from the de facto government will be of paramount importance.

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Within the next three months, Open Net Afghanistan hopes to mobilize the media and the Afghan diaspora to raise funds for five to ten Starlink and mesh bundles “to demonstrate feasibility” of use by vetted NGO and educational partners, Bahaduri said. She also hopes to find partnerships with VPN providers Psiphon, Outline, and Briar “to strengthen Afghan access under mobile-only conditions.”

While many are focusing on the devastation of the Taliban’s latest moves, hope is still within reach. It would be the ultimate blow to the Taliban’s misogynistic worldview if their efforts to shroud Afghanistan in darkness were obliterated by educated, indomitable Afghan women.

Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project podcast.