Kabul's women shed their burqas

The burqas. After five years of having to cover themselves from head to toe, the women of Kabul finally showed their faces again today. Smiling faces, laughing faces, bathed in sunshine for the first time since the Taliban seized the capital in 1996.

Thirty-six hours after the Taliban fled from the city, the people are enjoying new-found freedoms. Markets are bustling. Music is played in streets where none has been heard for five years. Men have shaved off their beards.

But it is the women casting off their burqas who symbolise most the end of repression. In Foruj-Ga market, a woman works in a shop wearing a black headscarf that reveals her face: until yesterday she would neither have been allowed to work nor reveal her face.

One woman told how much she used to hate wearing her burqa. "Your head hurts and your eyes hurt from the limited vision," Nadera, a 35-year-old kindergarten teacher said. "It was very difficult to walk without falling over, especially on the stairs."

But many women on Kabul's streets remain hidden. "It's too early. Still the situation is uncertain," said Shasia. One man said it was not for the women alone to decide. "They have their husbands, and their fathers. It is our tradition," said Mohammed Shah. "And even the educated woman does not want to right away throw her burqa away. Slowly, slowly they will make a decision to stop wearing it."

A stroll through this city shows a society able to stretch its legs after years of Taliban slavery. "The feeling is like being a little bird, like now you can finally put out your wings," says my translator, Feridun.

Children are flying kites in the parks, men are having their beards either trimmed or shaved off, and though most women still go to the shops wearing the burqa, there is the flash of ankle and high-heeled shoes.

The newly renamed Radio Afghanistan has started broadcasting music - banned as frivolous under the Taliban - and has taken on three women as news readers.

Daoud Naimi, the new acting director of TV Afghanistan, said he hoped to resume TV broadcasts soon. Television was banned by the Taliban, along with neckties, kiteflyingand high-heels. In his music shop Mohamed Salim is quite literally erasing the Taliban from Kabul - taping new music over the cassettes of religious chanting which the former regime forced him to sell.

Today's victim is former Taliban Top Ten chanter Fakhir Mohammed, whose monotonous warbles were a firm favourite until the regime fled on Monday. Now a tape of his chants is being dubbed over with the soundtrack from an Indian film.

Getting to the front counter in Salim's shop means fighting your way past dozens of young men, all eager for tapes. For the moment he has run out, producing new ones only as fast as his tape-to-tape machine can dub over the Taliban cassettes. "This is the best business in five years," he says. "We're very happy just to hear music again." Outside, Salim's music merges with the cacophony of tunes - Indian and Western - being pumped into the street at maximum volume.

Until Monday night, when the Taliban fled, Farashgar was a grim place to visit: those shops which bothered to put music onto their speaker systems had only repetitive chants to offer. Business was bad, and also uncertain. "If a Talib came to the shop, he would say 'give me one cassette, I will pay you after'," said Salim, 22. "But maybe the money would never come. What could you do?" What they did was sell underground music: many of the tape boxes on Salim's shelves held a secret.

He shows me why. On the labels of some cassette boxes are the names of various Taliban chanters. But he opens the box to reveal, scrawled over the tape, an Indian singer. "We would sell this way, to people we know. The hard thing was remembering which singer was in which cassette box." The other hard thing were the men from the notorious Ministry for Vice and Virtue. These so called "religious police" were the Taliban's gestapo, and the shopkeepers of Farashgar were a favourite target. "I was in jail four times. For one month, for one week, the last for 18 days," says Salim.

In the next-door shop to Salim's, his friend Mohamed Talut Taheri says: "Sometimes they could come to raid, they would open all the cassette boxes, then you were caught. The other way was that someone would be arrested for something. They would search him and find a cassette. If he told them where he got it, you were in jail."

Now the problem is supply. With the overland route to Pakistan cut, there are no more CDs and only dubbed tapes on offer to a public clamourous for music. This means prices have shot up: A tape from Salim's shop that was £1.80 when you risked jail to buy it is now £2.80. But nothing drives away the customers. "We love to hear music. Indian, Western, it doesn't matter," says Salim. "It's just so nice that music is back."

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