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

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

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

The Taliban’s recently reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Advantage and Prevention of Vice introduced on Saturday that it's “required for all respectable Afghan girls to wear a hijab”, or scarf.

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

Also acceptable as a hijab, the assertion declared, is a long black veil protecting a woman from head to toe.

The ministry statement offered a description: “Any garment protecting the body of a lady is taken into account a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to represent the physique parts nor is it thin enough to disclose the body.”

Punishment was also detailed: Male guardians of offending women will receive a warning, and for repeated offences they will be imprisoned.

“If a girl is caught with no hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will probably be warned. The second time, the guardian will likely be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will likely be imprisoned for 3 days,” in keeping with the assertion.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, mentioned that government workers who violate the hijab rule will likely be fired.

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

The brand new decree is the latest in a collection of edicts proscribing women’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer season. News of the decree was obtained with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

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

The professor’s title has been changed to guard her id, 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 males, they have an issue with my hijab, then they need to observe their very own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she stated.

“Why should we be treated like third-class residents because they cannot follow Islam and control their sexual needs?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried lady who looks after her mom, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small family.

“I'm single, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mom,” she said.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my solely mahram, in an attack 18 years in the past. Would they now have me borrow a mahram for them [to] punish me next time?” she asked.

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 girls from travelling alone.

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

“When I attempt to clarify I don’t have one, they won’t hear. It doesn’t matter that I'm a respected professor; they show no dignity and order the taxi drivers to abandon me on the roads,” she mentioned.

“I've needed to stroll a number of kilometres to dwelling or my classes on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments had been echoed by girls’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and out of doors the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a frontrunner in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that passed off after the Taliban takeover last summer season. She evaded arrest during a Taliban crackdown on female protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a convention in Norway, demanding that they launch her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules haven't any authorized foundation, and send a improper message to the young women of this era in Afghanistan, decreasing their identity to their garments,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan girls to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she mentioned.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are extra than just the correct to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted only on the fitting to marriage, but did not address issues of labor and training for girls.

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

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] is just not insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We received this on our personal may, fighting the patriarchal society, and nobody can take away us from the neighborhood.”

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

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

However the worldwide neighborhood had failed Afghan women yet again, Hamidi mentioned.

“For a decade Afghan women have been warning all actors concerned in peace negotiations about what returning the Taliban to energy will means to women,” she mentioned.

The present state of affairs has resulted from flawed insurance policies and the worldwide community’s lack of “understanding on how critical ladies’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she mentioned.

“It is a blatant violation of the proper to freedom of alternative and movement, and the Taliban got the space and time [by the international community] to impose further reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi stated.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying an entire generation with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It is a crime towards humanity to allow a rustic to turn into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, including that repercussions from the continued state of affairs in Afghanistan will likely be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared an analogous sense of disappointment.

“We're a country that has produced a number of the most good ladies leaders. I used to teach my students the value of respecting and supporting ladies,” she said.

“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 pieces with every new ‘regulation’ and decrees they challenge that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”