Meet the Female Members of the Afghan Military’s Elite Special Forces

It is probably safe to say that Yabenda is one of the few elite soldiers in the world who wears a rhinestone glued to her lateral incisor. On a cloudless May morning at the Kabul Military Training Center, a vast complex at the point where the dusty Afghan capital fades into a scrabbly mountain, the 21-year-old rests a pink fingernail on the trigger of her M-4 and considers her first few months in the Afghan military’s special forces. “It’s a hard job,” admits Yabenda, who like her other colleagues has asked to be identified only by her last name. “You have to be brave. But we want all women in Afghanistan to be able to be brave.”

Yabenda is one of the newest recruits to the special forces, a handpicked unit that is increasingly seen as crucial to the fight against the Taliban after most foreign troops leave the country next year. About 30 of the team’s members are women, a rare thing in any top military unit, let alone the military of a country where deeply conservative attitudes about women are still widely held. “Some people — even some educated people — say women should not be in this unit,” says Haidary, a 20-year-old soldier who joined at the same time as Yabenda. “We could all go work somewhere else, but we want to serve our country.”

The country needs them. In 2011, the U.S. handed over to Afghan forces nearly full control of nighttime raids on the homes of suspected insurgents. But even before that, when the formerly all-male special-forces squad started conducting operations, its leaders realized they faced a problem. Having male soldiers physically search and interrogate women violated Afghan social and religious norms, and consequently such searches rarely happened. That created the risk that women might help men in their household smuggle weapons out under their burqas. “We would ask women to pull their headscarves tight so we could see if there were weapons underneath,” recalls Major Asahanullaq, the unit’s chief of staff. “The women would get angry. The soldiers didn’t like to do it, but they had to.”

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It became apparent that the best solution was to bring female soldiers in to help. But that meant finding some. When the government aired its first calls for female recruits, the response was tepid. Colonel Jalaluddin Yaftaly, the unit’s commander, says it took nearly a year to put the first group of 16 recruits together. By the time he started looking for a second class, however, he had more applicants than he could handle. “People are thinking about building the country now,” says Yaftaly. “People are calling me and wanting to send their daughters. That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.”

On a dusty mound at the edge of the training camp, during a mock operation, Yabenda crouches in front of a civilian wearing a blue silk burqa and scribbles notes onto a pad of paper. When helicopters drop special-forces teams into a remote location in the middle of the night, it is now the female soldiers’ job to separate, search and interview the women and children, probing for information about what ties their brothers or husbands might have to militants. “The kids are scared,” says Yabenda. Rhinestone or no, in full gear, she and her colleagues do not look any less intimidating than their male counterparts — but they do carry sweets to hand out to frightened children. “We don’t want to upset them,” she says.

No women have been killed on duty, says Yaftaly, but it is certainly possible, given the risks they take. Yaftaly estimates hundreds of insurgents have been killed or arrested in the night raids since Afghan forces began conducting them. The new female recruits appear undaunted — at least amid the predictable routines of another day of training. After shooting practice, the five new soldiers sit at the back of a noisy mess hall, grumbling over being too late to grab any of the fresh fruit that had been served at lunch. They talk about how military life isn’t as hard as they thought it would be, except for the long runs in full gear, which, they admit, are tough. They talk about how this is the only job they ever want to do, and how maybe one day, it will be one of them leading the men. “We’re not scared to die,” says Qadri, who at 24 is the oldest member of the group. “What we’re scared of is that we might lose our country.”

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