Afghan girls deplore Taliban’s new order to cover faces in public | Taliban News

The Taliban has issued yet another decree imposing additional restrictions on Afghan girls, and criminalising their clothes.

While the Taliban have at all times imposed restrictions to control the bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the primary for this regime the place criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the costume code for ladies.

The Taliban’s just lately reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan women to wear a hijab”, or scarf.

The ministry, in a statement, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) because the “best hijab” of selection.

Also acceptable as a hijab, the assertion declared, is an extended black veil overlaying a girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement provided a description: “Any garment protecting the physique of a woman is taken into account a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to signify the body components neither is it thin sufficient to disclose the body.”

Punishment was additionally detailed: Male guardians of offending women will obtain a warning, and for repeated offences they are going to be imprisoned.

“If a girl is caught without a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) shall be warned. The second time, the guardian might be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will likely be imprisoned for three days,” according to the statement.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, said that authorities workers who violate the hijab rule will be fired.

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “shall be despatched to the court docket for further punishment”, he stated.

The brand new decree is the newest in a series of edicts limiting girls’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer season. News of the decree was received with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan women and activists.

“Why have they decreased ladies to [an] object that is being sexualised?” asked Marzia, a 50-year-old university professor from Kabul.

The professor’s title has been modified to guard her identity, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

“I'm a working towards Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim men, they have an issue with my hijab, then they need to observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she stated.

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class residents because they can not follow Islam and control their sexual needs?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an single woman who takes care of her mother, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the only breadwinner in her small family.

“I am single, and my father died very long ago, and I look after my mother,” she said.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only mahram, in an assault 18 years ago. Would they now have me borrow a mahram for them [to] punish me next time?” she requested.

Marzia has repeatedly been stopped by the Taliban while travelling on her personal to work in her university, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids ladies from travelling alone.

“They often stop the taxi I am in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia said.

“When I attempt to explain I don’t have one, they won’t hear. It doesn’t matter that I am a respected professor; they present no dignity and order the taxi drivers to desert me on the roads,” she stated.

“I have needed to stroll several kilometres to dwelling or my classes on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by girls’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and outside the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that took place after the Taliban takeover final summer time. She evaded arrest during a Taliban crackdown on feminine protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a convention in Norway, demanding that they release her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules have no legal foundation, and send a wrong message to the young women of this technology in Afghanistan, decreasing their id to their clothes,” said Khamosh, who urged Afghan ladies to boost their voices.

“Never be silent,” she said.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are extra than simply the fitting to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that focused solely on the precise to marriage, but did not tackle issues of work and training for women.

“Women have dignity and agency over their lives,” she mentioned.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] isn't insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We received this on our personal would possibly, combating the patriarchal society, and nobody can take away us from the group.”

The activists also stated they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty International, stated that even after the Taliban’s take over final August, Afghan women continued to insist that the international community maintain girls’s rights as “a non-negotiable element of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the worldwide group had failed Afghan ladies yet once more, Hamidi mentioned.

“For a decade Afghan girls have been warning all actors concerned in peace negotiations about what returning the Taliban to power will means to ladies,” she stated.

The present scenario has resulted from flawed policies and the worldwide community’s lack of “understanding on how serious ladies’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she stated.

“It is a blatant violation of the fitting to freedom of selection and movement, and the Taliban got the house and time [by the international community] to impose additional reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi mentioned.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a complete technology with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It's a crime in opposition to humanity to permit a rustic to show into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, adding that repercussions from the ongoing state of affairs in Afghanistan will likely be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared the same sense of disappointment.

“We're a country that has produced some of the most brilliant ladies leaders. I used to show my students the value of respecting and supporting girls,” she mentioned.

“I gave hope to so many younger ladies and all of that has been thrown in [the] trash as meaningless,” she said.

“My coronary heart breaks into items with each new ‘regulation’ and decrees they issue that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”