A Year After Taliban's Return, Afghan Women Fight For Lost Freedoms

Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls are banned from going to high school.

Monesa Mubarez is not going to give up the rights she and other Afghan women won during 20 years of Western-backed rule easily.

Before the hardline Islamist Taliban movement swept back to power a year ago, the 31-year-old served as a director of policy monitoring at the finance ministry.

She was one of many women, mostly in big cities, who won freedoms that a former generation could not have dreamed of under the Taliban's previous rule in the late 1990s.

Now Mubarez has no job, after the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law severely limited women's ability to work, required them to dress and act conservatively and closed secondary schools to girls across the country.