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

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

Whereas 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 felony punishment is assigned for violation of the costume code for ladies.

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

The ministry, in an announcement, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) because the “finest hijab” of choice.

Additionally acceptable as a hijab, the statement declared, is a long black veil covering a woman from head to toe.

The ministry statement supplied a description: “Any garment covering the body of a woman is taken into account a hijab, offered that it is not too tight to signify the body elements nor is it skinny enough to reveal the physique.”

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

“If a woman is caught without a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will likely be warned. The second time, the guardian shall be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will probably be imprisoned for 3 days,” in line with the assertion.

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

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

The brand new decree is the latest in a series of edicts restricting ladies’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer time. Information of the decree was received 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 college professor from Kabul.

The professor’s identify has been changed to protect her identification, 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 men, they've a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why should we be handled like third-class citizens as a result of they can't practice Islam and control their sexual desires?” the professor requested, anger evident in her voice.

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

“I am single, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mother,” 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 subsequent time?” she requested.

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

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

“When I try to explain I don’t have one, they received’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter that I'm a revered professor; they present no dignity and order the taxi drivers to desert me on the roads,” she mentioned.

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

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

Activist Huda Khamosh was a frontrunner within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that befell after the Taliban takeover last summer time. She evaded arrest throughout a Taliban crackdown on feminine protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a conference in Norway, demanding that they launch her fellow feminine protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules have no authorized foundation, and ship a flawed message to the young ladies of this era in Afghanistan, decreasing their id to their clothes,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to raise their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are more than just the best to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted only on the proper to marriage, however did not deal with points of labor and training for women.

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

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

The activists also said they'd predicted the present developments in Afghanistan, and positioned equal blame on the international neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the situation.

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 worldwide community maintain ladies’s rights as “a non-negotiable part of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the international neighborhood had failed Afghan women yet again, Hamidi stated.

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

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

“It's a blatant violation of the suitable to freedom of selection and movement, and the Taliban got the area 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 generation 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 population,” she said, adding that repercussions from the ongoing scenario in Afghanistan will probably be felt globally.

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

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

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

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