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

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

Whereas the Taliban have always imposed restrictions to manipulate the our bodies of Afghan ladies, the decree is the primary for this regime where criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the costume code for women.

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 ladies 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 statement declared, is an extended black veil protecting a girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement provided a description: “Any garment masking the physique of a woman is considered a hijab, supplied that it is not too tight to symbolize the body elements nor is it thin sufficient to reveal the physique.”

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

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

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

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “will be sent to the courtroom for further punishment”, he said.

The brand new decree is the latest in a sequence of edicts limiting ladies’s freedoms imposed because the Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan final summer. Information of the decree was received with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan girls and activists.

“Why have they diminished girls to [an] object that is being sexualised?” asked 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 am a practicing Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they have an issue with my hijab, then they need to observe their very own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class residents because they cannot practice Islam and control their sexual desires?” the professor requested, anger evident in her voice.

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

“I am single, 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 asked.

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

“They frequently stop the taxi I'm in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

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

“I've had to stroll several kilometres to house or my courses on more than one event.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by ladies’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and outside the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that came about after the Taliban takeover last summer season. She evaded arrest throughout a Taliban crackdown on feminine protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a convention 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 have no authorized foundation, and send a mistaken message to the younger girls of this technology in Afghanistan, decreasing their identity to their clothes,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to lift 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 mentioned, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted only on the proper to marriage, but didn't handle issues of labor and schooling for girls.

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

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] is not insignificant progress to lose overnight. We received this on our personal might, combating the patriarchal society, and nobody can remove us from the community.”

The activists also stated that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide group for not recognising the urgency of the situation.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty International, mentioned that even after the Taliban’s take over last 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”.

However the international community had failed Afghan women but once more, Hamidi stated.

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

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

“It's a blatant violation of the best to freedom of selection and motion, and the Taliban got the house 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 technology with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It is a crime against humanity to allow a country to show into a prison for half its population,” she stated, including that repercussions from the continued situation in Afghanistan might be felt globally.

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

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

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

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