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

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

While the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to manipulate the bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the primary for this regime the place felony punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for ladies.

The Taliban’s lately reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Advantage and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan ladies 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 “best hijab” of choice.

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

The ministry assertion provided a description: “Any garment overlaying the physique of a girl is considered a hijab, supplied that it's not too tight to represent the physique parts nor is it thin sufficient to disclose the physique.”

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

“If a girl is caught with out a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will be warned. The second time, the guardian can be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian shall be imprisoned for three days,” based on the statement.

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

And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “might be despatched to the courtroom for further punishment”, he said.

The brand new decree is the newest in a sequence of edicts proscribing women’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer time. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan women and activists.

“Why have they diminished ladies to [an] object that's being sexualised?” requested Marzia, a 50-year-old college professor from Kabul.

The professor’s identify has been modified to protect 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 males, they have a problem with my hijab, then they need to observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why ought to we be treated like third-class citizens because they can not apply Islam and control their sexual desires?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried woman who looks after her mom, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small family.

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

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only 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 requested.

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

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

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

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

Marzia’s sentiments had been echoed by women’s rights activists primarily based in Afghanistan and outdoors the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that passed off after the Taliban takeover last summer. 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 feminine protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules haven't any legal basis, and send a wrong message to the younger ladies of this technology in Afghanistan, lowering their identity to their garments,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to lift their voices.

“Never be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are extra than simply the correct to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted solely on the proper to marriage, but didn't deal with points of labor and education for ladies.

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

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] will not be insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We gained this on our own would possibly, preventing the patriarchal society, and nobody can take away us from the community.”

The activists also mentioned that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the international neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the scenario.

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

However the international community had failed Afghan girls yet again, Hamidi said.

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

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

“It's a blatant violation of the proper to freedom of alternative and movement, and the Taliban were given the space 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 era with their silence,” she said.

“It is a crime towards humanity to permit a country to show into a prison for half its inhabitants,” she said, adding that repercussions from the continued state of affairs in Afghanistan shall be felt globally.

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

“We are a rustic that has produced a number of the most sensible ladies leaders. I used to show my students the worth of respecting and supporting women,” she stated.

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

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