An all-girls robotic team in Afghanistan is frantically trying to escape the country in the wake of the Taliban seizing control.

Video screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET

“These girls are extremely terrified,” NY-based international human rights lawyer Kimberley Motley told the Canadian Broadcast News on Sunday. The girls on the team want to come to Canada to complete their education, and Motley is trying to help them.

“They’re in Herat, where now in the universities, they’re turning girls away,” Motley said. “They’re telling girls, ‘Don’t come back to the university.’ Women are showing up for work and are being turned away. They’re seeing this and watching tearfully as their city is crumbling.”

The Taliban captured the girls’ hometown of Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city and a strategic provincial capital, as fighters approached the capital of Kabul. Taliban fighters took control of Kabul Sunday, all but officially sealing their takeover of the whole country. This NBC video shows members of the militant group rushing past Herat’s historic blue Mosque toward government buildings.

Afghan tech entrepreneur Roya Mahboob started the Afghan Girls Robotics Team group in 2017. Mahboob heads the Digital Citizen Fund, which runs classes for girls in STEM and robotics.

Members of the team, who range in age from 12 to 18, have overcome war and other hardships to pursue their love of engineering and robotics. They’ve made global headlines as a symbol of a more progressive Afghanistan.

This CNET video shows them accepting the silver medal for “courageous achievement” in a 2018 international robotics competition. Other teams had four months to build their robots, but the team from Afghanistan had only two weeks to build and ship their ball-sorting bot to Washington DC.

Motley says she fears for the girls’ future now that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has reportedly fled the country, leaving the Taliban in power and parts of the country in panic and chaos.

“Unfortunately, what’s been happening to little girls over this last week is that the Taliban has literally been going from door to door and taking girls out and forcing them to become child brides.”