For the last decade, Sara (not her real name), 25, has dreamed of becoming a doctor. She secured a highly sought after place to study medicine at Kabul University in February 2021, but in a matter of months the Taliban returned to power and imposed a ban on women studying for degrees. Sara had been searching for other options.
Then the University of Glasgow offered her a lifeline. Her visa application was made just days before the Home Office introduced a visa brake in March 2026 for students from Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar and Cameroon. Her teachers consider her to be an exceptionally able and dedicated student, she had secured funding and the university was waiting to welcome her on to a gateway course at its school of medicine, dentistry and nursing – a route to a full degree course to become a doctor.
So why have the UK’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and her officials gone to such extraordinary lengths to bar her? Sara says her life has been “challenge after challenge”. She survived a suicide bomb attack on her school, swerved her father’s attempts to force her into early marriage, as well as the omnipresent Taliban who patrol Kabul’s streets.
Then she made a nail-biting escape from her country and avoided capture by police in Pakistan who were searching for her. But it is the UK’s Home Office, which champions women’s rights, that has inflicted the deadliest blow. Sara grew up in a poor household in Kabul in the period before the Taliban regained power.
Against the wishes of her violent father, who wanted to see her follow the traditional path of teenage marriage and a life of enforced domesticity in service to a husband, she fought to continue her education, encouraged to aim high by inspirational female teachers at her single-sex school. While boys were free, my mum, who has always supported me, was told by relatives that rather than pursuing an education I needed to go somewhere where I could be taught to cook. After a relative’s daughter got married I was told I was next in line.” But at school, she saw that life could be different.
She said that we would face challenges but should never give up in pursuing our dreams.” Sara says that she is still in contact with some of the girls she was at school with, who were similarly inspired by their female teachers. Some of them are now flying high in other countries, having been granted full university scholarships. But there were others whose ambitions were thwarted.
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