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

The Taliban has issued yet one more decree imposing further restrictions on Afghan girls, and criminalising their clothing.

While the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan ladies, the decree is the first for this regime the place criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the costume code for women.

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

The ministry, in a press release, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) as the “greatest hijab” of alternative.

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

The ministry statement supplied an outline: “Any garment covering the body of a lady is considered a hijab, offered that it isn't too tight to represent the body elements nor is it skinny enough to reveal the physique.”

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

“If a woman is caught and not using a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will be warned. The second time, the guardian shall be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will be imprisoned for three days,” in accordance with the statement.

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

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “will probably be sent to the court docket for additional punishment”, he said.

The new decree is the most recent in a series of edicts restricting women’s freedoms imposed since the Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer season. Information of the decree was obtained with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

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

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

“I'm a practising Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they've a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she stated.

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

As an unmarried girl 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 mom,” she stated.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only mahram, in an assault 18 years in the past. 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 own to work in her university, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids girls from travelling alone.

“They commonly stop the taxi I'm in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

“When I try to clarify I don’t have one, they gained’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter that I am a revered professor; they show no dignity and order the taxi drivers to abandon me on the roads,” she mentioned.

“I've needed to walk several kilometres to dwelling or my courses on multiple event.”

Marzia’s sentiments have been echoed by girls’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and outdoors the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that happened 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 release her fellow feminine protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed guidelines have no legal foundation, and send a flawed message to the young ladies of this era in Afghanistan, reducing their identification to their garments,” said Khamosh, who urged Afghan girls to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are extra than simply the right to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that centered only on the fitting to marriage, but did not address points of work and training for ladies.

“Women have dignity and company over their lives,” she stated.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] is just not insignificant progress to lose overnight. We gained this on our personal would possibly, fighting the patriarchal society, and no one can remove us from the group.”

The activists additionally said they'd predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the international group for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

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

But the international community had failed Afghan women but once more, Hamidi mentioned.

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

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

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

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying an entire technology with their silence,” she stated.

“It's a crime in opposition to humanity to permit a country to show into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, adding that repercussions from the continued situation in Afghanistan shall be felt globally.

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

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

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

“My heart breaks into items with every new ‘law’ and decrees they difficulty that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”