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

The Taliban has issued one more decree imposing additional restrictions on Afghan women, and criminalising their clothes.

While the Taliban have always imposed restrictions to control the bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the first for this regime where prison punishment is assigned for violation of the gown code for girls.

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

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

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

The ministry statement offered a description: “Any garment overlaying the physique of a lady is considered a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to symbolize the body components neither is it thin enough to disclose the physique.”

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

“If a woman is caught with out a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) can be warned. The second time, the guardian will be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian might be imprisoned for 3 days,” in accordance with the assertion.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, stated that authorities employees who violate the hijab rule shall be fired.

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “will likely be sent to the courtroom for additional punishment”, he stated.

The new decree is the newest in a collection of edicts limiting women’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan final 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's being sexualised?” requested Marzia, a 50-year-old university professor from Kabul.

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

“I am a working towards Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they have a problem with my hijab, then they need to observe their very own hijab and lower their gaze,” she stated.

“Why ought to we be treated like third-class residents as a result of they can't 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 real breadwinner in her small family.

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mother,” she mentioned.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only mahram, in an attack 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 college, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids girls from travelling alone.

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

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

“I have needed to walk several kilometres to residence or my lessons on more than one occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments had been echoed by ladies’s rights activists primarily based in Afghanistan and outside the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that occurred after the Taliban takeover final summer season. She evaded arrest throughout 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 rules have no authorized basis, and ship a flawed message to the young ladies of this era in Afghanistan, lowering their identification to their garments,” said Khamosh, who urged Afghan ladies to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she said.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are extra than simply the proper to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that centered only on the precise to marriage, but did not handle issues of work and schooling for women.

“Girls have dignity and company over their lives,” she mentioned.

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

The activists additionally mentioned they'd predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and positioned equal blame on the worldwide neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the situation.

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 international neighborhood keep ladies’s rights as “a non-negotiable part of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

However the worldwide neighborhood had failed Afghan ladies but once more, Hamidi said.

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

The present state of affairs has resulted from flawed policies and the international neighborhood’s lack of “understanding on how serious ladies’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she said.

“It's a blatant violation of the right to freedom of choice and motion, and the Taliban were given 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 technology with their silence,” she stated.

“It is a crime towards humanity to permit a rustic to show into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she mentioned, adding that repercussions from the continued situation in Afghanistan can be felt globally.

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

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

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

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