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

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

Whereas the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to manipulate the our bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the first for this regime where prison punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for girls.

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

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

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

The ministry assertion supplied a description: “Any garment overlaying the body of a girl is considered a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to signify the body parts neither is it skinny enough to disclose the body.”

Punishment was also detailed: Male guardians of offending women 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) shall be warned. The second time, the guardian can be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian can be imprisoned for three days,” in line with the assertion.

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

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “can be despatched to the courtroom for additional punishment”, he stated.

The new decree is the most recent in a series of edicts restricting women’s freedoms imposed because the Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer time. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

“Why have they reduced ladies to [an] object that is being sexualised?” requested Marzia, a 50-year-old university professor from Kabul.

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

“I'm a practicing Muslim and worth what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they have an issue with my hijab, then they should observe their very own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she said.

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

As an single girl who takes care of her mom, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the sole breadwinner in her small household.

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

Marzia has repeatedly been stopped by the Taliban whereas 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 cease the taxi I'm in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia mentioned.

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

“I have needed to stroll a number of kilometres to dwelling or my courses on more than one occasion.”

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

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that came about after the Taliban takeover final 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 rules don't have any legal basis, and ship a mistaken message to the young girls of this technology in Afghanistan, reducing their identity to their garments,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to boost their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are extra than just the right to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted solely on the fitting to marriage, but didn't handle points of work and education for girls.

“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 gained this on our own would possibly, combating the patriarchal society, and no one can take away us from the community.”

The activists also stated they had predicted the present developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide 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 ladies continued to insist that the worldwide neighborhood maintain girls’s rights as “a non-negotiable component of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the worldwide neighborhood had failed Afghan girls yet once more, Hamidi mentioned.

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

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

“It's a blatant violation of the proper to freedom of selection and motion, and the Taliban were given the space and time [by the international community] to impose further reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying an entire technology with their silence,” she said.

“It is a crime in opposition to humanity to allow a country to show into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she mentioned, adding that repercussions from the continued situation in Afghanistan shall be felt globally.

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

“We're a rustic that has produced some of the most brilliant women leaders. I used to teach my college students the value of respecting and supporting ladies,” she stated.

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

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