Since August 2021, the Taliban has been determined to wage a war against Afghan women and girls. As people suffer from intense humanitarian crises, the absence of education, and the lack of healthcare and other public services, the Taliban instead chooses to regulate and restrict the rights of women and all Afghans.
Taliban policies, edicts issued regularly, and policing of women in public reflect an undue obsession with women and their rights.
During the first Taliban regime in Afghanistan (1996-2001), Afghan women and girls suffered severe human rights violations that were condemned worldwide. The current Taliban regime has reimposed more draconian restrictions on women’s education, employment, and mobility, unwaveringly determined to erase women from public life.
Today’s Taliban is still a regime of terrorists.
The Taliban has established an exclusive government made up solely of religious clerics who are mostly not well educated, reinstituted the Islamic Emirate of its first regime in the late 1990s and reimposed oppressive edicts—especially against women as well as ethnic and religious minorities. Breaking its promise of universal amnesty, the Taliban is still detaining, kidnapping, jailing, interrogating, torturing, and killing former officials, women, and civil society activists. Many who have disappeared are thought to be murdered or their whereabouts are still unknown to their families.
Evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch and The New York Times has documented the executions of more than 500 former government officials, former members of the security forces, human rights defenders, journalists, artists, and academics. According to Kabul News, 5,000 people were arrested by the Taliban Ministry of Interior in the month of June 2022 alone.
Heroic women continue to resist through peaceful protests, but they face increasing risks to their lives. Activist women who continue to protest in public are routinely arrested and warned they are in danger. Some have been killed in their homes.
The Taliban is the only regime in the world to deprive women and girls of an education.
As new rules are issued, the Taliban routinely eliminates women from all aspects of public life, through systemic gender apartheid Women have been forced from their jobs, slashing or losing their families’ income altogether, further aggravating the humanitarian crisis
Families struggling to survive through Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis have grasped at extreme measures to gain sources of income to feed their families. Some even sell their daughters, younger than 10 years old, into forced marriages.
In a poor country where access to healthcare has always been limited due to supply and personnel shortages, women cannot seek healthcare on their own as they must be accompanied by a “mahram,” a male chaperone. Maternal deaths during pregnancy and childbirth have increased.
Women must be covered head-to-toe in public, and are confined to their homes unless accompanied by a mahram. Public spaces such as amusement and nature parks, gyms, beauty salons, and more are now segregated by gender, or women are outright denied access by Taliban orders.
Per a Taliban edict, women should not leave home unless “necessary,” and the men in the family are responsible for policing women, preventing them from leaving home and encouraging domestic violence. If a woman goes outside of her home without a mahram, the man in the family will be warned, summoned by local Taliban and sent to jail for multiple violations.
The first Taliban regime often beat, flogged and even killed women for violating this and other edicts. This violent practice has continued under the new regime.
The Taliban shut down the Ministry for Women’s Affairs and replaced it with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – essentially a morality police. The agency regularly issues harsh, misogynistic edicts to eliminate the rights of women and girls. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has been abolished.
Today, Afghanistan is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for women and girls.