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

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

Whereas the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the first for this regime where legal punishment is assigned for violation of the gown code for ladies.

The Taliban’s just lately reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice introduced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan women to wear a hijab”, or headscarf.

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

Also acceptable as a hijab, the assertion declared, is an extended black veil protecting a lady from head to toe.

The ministry assertion offered a description: “Any garment overlaying the physique of a girl is taken into account a hijab, provided that it isn't too tight to represent the body parts nor is it skinny enough to reveal the body.”

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

“If a girl is caught and not using a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will be warned. The second time, the guardian will likely be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian shall be imprisoned for 3 days,” according to the assertion.

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

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

The new decree is the latest in a sequence of edicts proscribing girls’s freedoms imposed because the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan final summer time. News of the decree was received with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan girls and activists.

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

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

“I'm a practising Muslim and worth what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they've a problem with my hijab, then they need to 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 observe Islam and control their sexual desires?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

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

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very way back, and I take care of my mother,” she stated.

“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 while travelling on her own to work in her university, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids ladies from travelling alone.

“They often cease the taxi I am in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia said.

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

“I've needed to walk a number of kilometres to dwelling or my classes on a couple of occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments have been echoed by ladies’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and out of doors the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that took place after the Taliban takeover last summer. 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 launch her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

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

“By no means be silent,” she said.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are more than simply the right to decide on one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that focused solely on the correct to marriage, but did not deal with points of labor and education for women.

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

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

The activists additionally said that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the international community for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

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

However the worldwide group had failed Afghan ladies but again, Hamidi said.

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

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

“It is a blatant violation of the correct to freedom of selection and motion, and the Taliban got the area 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 era with their silence,” she said.

“It is a crime against humanity to allow a rustic to show into a prison for half its inhabitants,” she mentioned, adding that repercussions from the continued situation in Afghanistan will probably be felt globally.

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

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

“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 every new ‘regulation’ and decrees they subject that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”