Being an informed citizen is not always easy.

You want to know what's going on, to stay up to date with the big news stories that affect your fellow humans across the planet.

But the non-stop headlines makes it difficult to completely understand what's happening.

This is where we hope the explanation from the BBC World Service can help.

I'm Anu Anand, and in this series I ask some of my BBC colleagues to help me break down the internet.

To help me break down big global news events, using archive recordings made on the ground to make sense of why these stories are important.

The spaces that people can run to for safety are shrinking every day here.

Today we look at Afghanistan and ask how its political history dictates the attitudes towards women's rights in the country.

This is the explanation from the BBC World Service.

The BBC's Yogi Thalamai is usually based in Mumbai, India, just a few hours flight from nearby Afghanistan where she spent a lot of her time reporting.

When I met this 17-year-old girl in Kabul, throughout our conversation she wept and she wept about not being able to go to school.

I'm devastated. I've studied for 11 years despite the risks. After all these struggles, we are forced to set a tone.

In 2021 the Taliban, an extremist Islamic group of militants known for forcing women to quit their jobs, stay home and cover up from head to toe,

and publicly stoning to death those accused of breaking these rules took over the country for a second time.

And I think in that house that day I found it really hard to disconnect the journalist in me from the woman in me.

I miss my classmates, my teachers, my books, everything. I wanted to be someone and do something with my life, but all of that is gone and I'm left in darkness.

That is when it really struck me what this means.

You know that is the face that I remember now every single time my here girl is not able to get an education.

Desperation on a scale not seen in decades. Thousands have arrived in Kabul in the past few days.

Forced to leave everything behind.

The Taliban's second period of rule is just the latest development in a story of conflict, human rights abuses and ideological warfare going back decades.

Women's rights in Afghanistan covered so much in the news have changed with the country's politics from monarchy to communism to civil war, extremist religious rule and the presence of international troops.

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