Sadika Madadgar's appearances on online networks were similar to those of other successful young influencers.

She performed in the Afghan Star singing competition and gained a large following with her stunning voice and her down-to-earth demeanor as a girl next door.

But then the radical Islamic Taliban returned to power, and life suddenly changed for the twenty-two-year-old and other prominent influencers.

21,200 Afghans followed Sadika Madadgar on YouTube, 182,000 on Instagram.

One video shows her having fun slicing a melon, while another shows her singing a folk song in a café.

Madadgar is a devout Muslim, she wears a headscarf.

She was completely unprepared for the Taliban's seizure of power.

On Saturday, she posted a clearly political message on Instagram for the first time.

"I don't like sharing my grief online, but it makes me sick," she wrote. "My heart breaks when I see my homeland slowly being destroyed." The next day, the Taliban captured Kabul - and Madadgar's voice fell silent on the Internet .

The seizure of power by the Islamists shook the online world in Afghanistan.

Prominent influencers have fled, others have gone into hiding.

Millions of young Afghans fear that their Internet posts may now turn out to be life-threatening.

The memories from the time of the first Taliban reign of terror from 1996 to 2001 are all too present. At that time, women were excluded from public life, girls could not go to school - and there were brutal punishments, such as stoning on suspicion of adultery.

"People like me are no longer safe"

Some have little illusion about what the new era will mean for Afghanistan.

"If the Taliban take Kabul, people like me will no longer be safe," said fashion icon and businesswoman Ajeda Schadab to ZDF when the security situation was already deteriorating.

Every day, Schadab presented the latest models from her Kabul boutique on Instagram - just recently, she showed an asymmetrical, see-through ball gown to the music of Dua Lipa.

“Women like me who don't wear a veil, who work, don't accept them,” she told ZDF.

In the meantime, Schadab announced to her 290,000 followers on Instagram and 400,000 followers on TikTok that she was in Turkey.

Others also moved to safety: Aryana Sayeed, one of Afghanistan's best-known pop stars, posted a selfie on Wednesday from a US evacuation plane on the way to Doha.

"My heart, my prayers and my thoughts will always be with you," she wrote to her readers.

Following tips from activists, journalists and human rights organizations, Facebook has taken new security measures that allow users in Afghanistan to quickly block their accounts.

The US human rights organization Human Rights First distributed tips on how to remove digital traces in the languages ​​Pashto and Dari spoken in Afghanistan.

The organization Access Now, which campaigns for the rights of Internet users, warned that even mundane content could be dangerous.

Their authors could become "the target of reprisals, because they are in the eyes of not only the Taliban, but also other religious extremist groups in the country as infidels or un-Islamic," said the organization's Asia expert, Raman Chima, the AFP news agency.