Frantically they tear down the images, peeling off paper in jagged sheets until the women’s smiling faces are obliterated.
These are billboards in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, harmlessly picturing female models in bridal wear.
Harmless, that is, until the weekend, when the Taliban stormed the city. Now they are forbidden – the women must go.
This photograph and others of billboards featuring women being whitewashed, have come to symbolise the devastating plight feared to be awaiting women and girls across the country now the extremists are back in power.
It is they who stand to suffer the most after the West’s exit; women who the Taliban decree must be silenced, shrouded, torn down, like the billboards.
From 1996-2001 when the Taliban last ruled here with their warped version of Islam, women were mercilessly persecuted.
Girls were banned from school, women barred from work or even appearing in public without burqas and male escorts, even denied healthcare, unable to see a male doctor while females weren’t allowed to practice.
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Public flogging was the punishment for those who flouted the rules.
After western forces arrived, women were able push for equality again, with 3.3 million girls in education, and women making up more than one quarter of parliamentarians.
But today, countless scared female voices trapped in Kabul and across the country in Taliban-occupied villages and towns – most unable to escape, and many in hiding – believe despite promises from the extremists to the contrary, the same fate faces them once more.
In Kabul yesterday, women on the ground reported Taliban going house to house hunting for females known to work in the media and politics, “making lists”.
One pioneering female journalist hiding in Kabul confirmed the reports and told the Mirror she now could not leave her home.
The journalist, who as a child under the previous Taliban rule attended school dressed as a boy in a desperate bid to learn, said: “Today the presence of women in Kabul was very few.
“I’m obligated to stay at home and I’m afraid about the next days, what should we do? What will happen in the country? This is not only my fear.”
Asking not to be named, she added female friends had already encountered hostility from conservative men.
“My sisters and friends in Kabul say as they were rushing home today, people shouted at them, ‘The Taliban are coming because of you! The Taliban are here to discipline you!’”
Elsewhere in Afghanistan, sickening reports have started to filter of rapes and forced marriage in occupied areas.
Sarah Keeler of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan said: “In areas now controlled by Taliban forces, there are reports of rapes of girls, and edicts were issued demanding that families hand over girls aged 15 and over, and widows up to the age of 45, for forced marriages to Taliban soldiers.”
In previously captured Herat, the Taliban has already issued a declaration making burqas mandatory (prices of the all concealing garments are reportedly rising to reflect the new, fear-driven demand).
Women fear all their achievements will be eradicated.
“We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan,” says one young Afghan woman in a heartbreaking video posted on social media yesterday.
Looking little more than a teenager with her hair in plaits, she wipes away tears.
“I can’t help crying,” she continues. “No one cares about us. We will die slowly in history.”
Many high-profile female figures are now simply sitting ducks.
The country’s first female mayor, of Maidan Wardak province, says she is waiting to die.
Zarifa Ghafari, 27, said on Sunday: “I’m sitting here waiting for them to come. There is no one to help me or my family. I’m just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and kill me. I can’t leave my family. And anyway, where would I go?”
Afghanistan’s minister of education, Rangina Hamidi, said: “I might have to face consequences and I guess that’s the price that we pay for trying to make this world a little better.”
Afghanistan’s huge strides in women’s rights have widely been claimed as one of greatest achievements of the west’s controversial invasion.
When I visited Camp Bastion in Helmand Province in 2013 ahead of the withdrawal of British troops there, a RAF pilot spoke most animatedly of the changes he had witnessed from the air in terms of women’s lives.
He described seeing the reemergence of their tiny figures walking freely, many uncovered, going to school.
But those scenes are now under threat – or already gone.
In an emergency session of the UN Security Council on the situation in Afghanistan, United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres urged the Taliban to uphold human rights, especially for women and girls.
He said: “I am particularly concerned by accounts of mounting human rights violations against the women and girls of Afghanistan, who fear a return to the darkest days.”
Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 in Pakistan after she enraged them with her campaign for girls’ education, warned: “We cannot see a country going decades and centuries back. We have to take some bold stances for the protection of women and girls, for the protection of minority groups and for peace and stability in that region.”
In May, the Taliban said they would write laws to ensure women could participate in public life.
“The purpose would be enabling women to contribute to the country in a peaceful and protected environment,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
Yet earlier this year there were already reported instances of girls’ schools being burnt down.
In early July, Taliban fighters walked into the offices of Azizi Bank in the southern city of Kandahar and ordered nine women working there to leave.
They were taken home by armed men and told male relatives would have to take their jobs.
The same followed in a bank in Herat.
Since so-called peace talks with the Taliban began, women in professional jobs including journalism and law enforcement – even polio vaccination workers – have been assassinated.
The Taliban has denied responsibility.
In Kabul, where two-thirds are aged under 30, most women have no experience of Taliban control. These events have left them reeling.
Shocked students have reported being evacuated in panic from universities.
One student has told of she and her sisters hiding their diplomas and certificates.
Few have the option of escaping.
Few dare to believe the extremists’ empty promises.
Because, as Fawzia Koofi, Afghanistan’s first woman deputy speaker of parliament, summed up, the Taliban is “not afraid of the world’s superpowers” - but it is “afraid of women.”
