When Zahra Elham won reality singing competition Afghan Star — Afghanistan's equivalent to Australian Idol — at the age of 16, she sank to her knees and screamed.
It was March 2019. She had just become the first woman to win the competition, which launched in 2005, four years after the Taliban was overthrown by US and allied forces.
Elham is a member of the persecuted Hazara ethnic minority, from Ghazni province. Thousands of Hazaras were displaced in August 2018 when the Taliban attacked the provincial capital of Ghazni.
Commentators noted that a Hazara woman winning the publicly voted Afghan Star indicated that Afghanistan had shifted culturally since Taliban rule.
On stage during the finale, Elham said: "Today, I represent all the girls of Afghanistan. Today not only Zahra Elham but all the girls in Afghanistan have won."
But as the Taliban offensive intensified following the withdrawal of US and allied forces, Elham knew she had to leave her home.
"My life would be, without a doubt, in danger if I had stayed in Afghanistan," Elham told ABC TV's Art Works in August, one year after the Taliban returned to power.
She fled the country a few days before the fall of Kabul, making her way to the safety of Pakistan.
"When I couldn't leave through the airport, I tried other ways," she explains.
"I wore a burqa. They can't recognise us [wearing a burqa], because only the eyes are visible."
Now 19 years old, Elham lives in Melbourne, where she is restarting her music career.
She is one of many artists, musicians and former locally engaged employees (Afghan nationals working for the Australian government over the course of the 20-year war in Afghanistan) who have fled Afghanistan, and one of just 31,500 Afghan nationals offered resettlement in Australia.
Winning Afghan Star
Elham realised she wanted to be a singer — and take part in Afghan Star — while watching YouTube videos of Afghan pop singer Aryana Sayeed (who is also a judge on the series). Her parents encouraged her to pursue her ambition.
Elham says that she always believed she could win: "I was sure that I had the talent … It was one of my dreams to win Afghan Star."
While she was the subject of some negative social media attention, with critics describing her voice as nasal, she says that when she won, the studio audience were "crying happy tears" and hugging each other.
"I showed that Afghan girls, too, can sing and can do anything that they desire to do," she says.
Massood Sanjer, program manager for TOLO, the network that produces Afghan Star, explained the significance of the show to The Washington Post in 2017: "Music has always been in the blood of Afghans, but it was silenced for a long time … Afghan Star has created a revolution in music at the same time the country has moved to democracy."
But the reality series has been criticised by conservative Muslim leaders, and even drawn violent attacks.
The winner of Afghan Star in 2009, Navid Forogh, was shot in the shoulder by a masked gunman in 2012, following a sellout concert. He fled to Australia, seeking asylum.
In 2016, seven of TOLO's staff were killed in a suicide attack in Kabul.
Clerics and Muslim scholars protested against the show in Kabul and Herat in November 2017, petitioning the government to cancel the show, and attempting to stop auditions from taking place.
Religious scholar Abdul Basit Khalili told The Washington Post in 2017 that Afghan Star "seduces the youth and pushes the country into a deeper crisis".
"We want programs that teach science and technology, not ones that deviate them from the right track," he said.
But opinions like Khalili's haven't deterred young people like Elham from either entering or watching the series.
When Elham won Afghan Star, she acknowledged the possibility that the Taliban could return to power. She told Agence France-Presse: "I will fight with my music, because I want to make my life music and singing."
Elham performs both contemporary Afghan pop music and traditional folk, but she says she is also influenced by musicians from outside of Afghanistan, including Justin Bieber, and Bollywood performers Shreya Ghoshal and Arijit Singh.
"They have always been role models [to me]," Elham says.
As she embarks on a new phase of her life and career, she tells ABC Arts: "I want to know more about Australian music and what Australian artists do."
The danger of staying in Afghanistan
In 2021, when the Taliban reclaimed control of Afghanistan, they said they would respect the rights of women. That promise has not been kept. Girls are being denied a secondary education and women have been forced out of the workforce. Women are required to be accompanied by a male guardian when they leave home, and to cover their faces in public.
Elham says: "When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, I thought the first thing they would do was ban girls from many things. Afghan girls won't be able to study, they won't be able to work outside the home, let alone play music."
When the Taliban first seized Afghanistan in 1996, non-religious music – as well as other forms of entertainment, such as TV, cinema and even chess – were banned.
In August 2021, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the New York Times they intended to outlaw music once again.
"Music is forbidden in Islam, but we're hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them," he said.
In December, students and teachers from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and their relatives arrived in Portugal, where they were granted asylum. Now, they rehearse in a former military hospital in Lisbon, while their former school has been ransacked by the Taliban, with instruments destroyed and classrooms turned into offices and dorms.
Artists are prohibited from even singing in their homes.
"I have artist friends who are still in Afghanistan. They said that they had a show somewhere, and when the Taliban saw them performing, they had to run away. The Taliban burned all the instruments, such as the harmonium and tabla [a pair of twin hand drums]," Elham says.
"They managed to get home safe, only just."
Looking to the future
Elham moved to Australia two months ago on a permanent humanitarian visa, granted to people who face substantial discrimination or the threat of human rights abuses.
"When I was little, Australia was always on my list of dream countries. I always wanted to go there," she says.
"The moment when I got the Australian visa, I was extremely happy … I could go to Australia and do all of the things I wanted."
She now plans to start performing and studying music again, but she says "it's stressful to start [making] music in a new place, especially in a country with a different language".
One day, she would love to perform in Afghanistan again.
"If someone can't express their pain or what is in their heart, they can express it through music … There's no music in Afghanistan right now," she says.
"I hope the situation in Afghanistan gets resolved, so that we can, once again, do the things that our hearts want."
