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

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

While the Taliban have at all times imposed restrictions to manipulate the our bodies of Afghan ladies, the decree is the first for this regime where criminal 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 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) as the “greatest hijab” of alternative.

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

The ministry statement provided a description: “Any garment covering the physique of a girl is considered a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to symbolize the physique elements neither 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 are going to be imprisoned.

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

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

And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “can be sent to the court docket for further punishment”, he said.

The new decree is the most recent in a sequence of edicts proscribing ladies’s freedoms imposed because the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last summer time. Information of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

“Why have they reduced women 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 guard her identity, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

“I'm a training Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim men, they have a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why ought to we be treated like third-class citizens as a result of they can not follow Islam and control their sexual needs?” the professor requested, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried lady who takes care of her mom, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the sole breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very way back, and I look after my mother,” she stated.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my solely mahram, in an attack 18 years ago. 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 whereas travelling on her personal to work in her college, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids girls from travelling alone.

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

“When I attempt to explain I don’t have one, they received’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 said.

“I have needed to stroll a number of kilometres to home or my lessons on more than one event.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by women’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and out of doors the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter within the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that occurred 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 legal foundation, and send a fallacious message to the young ladies of this technology in Afghanistan, reducing their identity to their clothes,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to lift their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she mentioned.

“The rights granted to a girl [in Islam] are extra than just the appropriate to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that focused only on the fitting to marriage, however didn't address points of labor and training for women.

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

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] shouldn't be insignificant progress to lose overnight. We received this on our personal might, preventing the patriarchal society, and no one can take away us from the neighborhood.”

The activists also said they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and positioned 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 Worldwide, stated that even after the Taliban’s take over final August, Afghan girls continued to insist that the worldwide community maintain women’s rights as “a non-negotiable part of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the worldwide community had failed Afghan girls yet once more, Hamidi said.

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

The present scenario has resulted from flawed insurance policies and the worldwide group’s lack of “understanding on how serious women’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she mentioned.

“It is a blatant violation of the precise to freedom of choice and movement, and the Taliban were given the house and time [by the international community] to impose additional reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a whole era with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It's a crime against humanity to allow a country to turn into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, including that repercussions from the continued scenario in Afghanistan might be felt globally.

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

“We are a rustic that has produced among the most good ladies leaders. I used to show my students the value of respecting and supporting girls,” she stated.

“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 each new ‘law’ and decrees they difficulty that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”