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.

Whereas the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the primary for this regime where felony punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for girls.

The Taliban’s not too long ago reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Advantage and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan girls to wear a hijab”, or headband.

The ministry, in a statement, identified 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 girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement supplied a description: “Any garment protecting the body of a girl is considered a hijab, supplied that it's not too tight to characterize the body components neither is it skinny sufficient to reveal the body.”

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

“If a woman is caught with no hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will likely be warned. The second time, the guardian might be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will probably be imprisoned for three days,” in accordance with the statement.

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

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “will be despatched to the court for further punishment”, he mentioned.

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

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

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

“Why ought to we be treated like third-class citizens as a result of they cannot apply Islam and control their sexual desires?” 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 take care of my mother,” she mentioned.

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

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

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

“I have needed to walk a number of kilometres to house or my courses on multiple occasion.”

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

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that came about after the Taliban takeover final summer time. She evaded arrest during a Taliban crackdown on female protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a conference in Norway, demanding that they release her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules have no authorized basis, and ship a improper message to the younger women of this era in Afghanistan, reducing their identity to their clothes,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan girls to lift their voices.

“Never be silent,” she said.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are more than simply the appropriate to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh mentioned, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that centered solely on the suitable to marriage, but didn't address issues of labor and schooling for girls.

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

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

The activists also said that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide 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 worldwide community keep ladies’s rights as “a non-negotiable component of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

However the international group had failed Afghan women but once more, Hamidi mentioned.

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

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

“It's a blatant violation of the best to freedom of choice and motion, and the Taliban got the space and time [by the international community] to impose extra reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi mentioned.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a whole generation with their silence,” she said.

“It is a crime in opposition to humanity to allow a rustic to turn into a jail for half its population,” she said, adding that repercussions from the continuing scenario in Afghanistan will be felt globally.

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

“We are a country that has produced among the most sensible women leaders. I used to show my college students the value of respecting and supporting women,” she stated.

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

“My heart breaks into pieces with each new ‘regulation’ and decrees they subject that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”