Amidst mounting reports of sexual violence being inflicted on women and girls held in detention in Afghanistan, video evidence of a female Afghan human rights activist being tortured and sexually abused by armed members of the Taliban has surfaced, believed to be the first direct evidence of such crimes occurring in the country since the Taliban took over in 2021.
As many countries in Central and Western Asia, such as Iran and Afghanistan, have made it mandatory to wear hijab and other forms of Islamic headscarves, Tajikistan, where 96% of its population identifies as Muslim, took the opposite direction and passed a law banning the use of hijab, calling it an “alien garment” as the ex-Soviet country seeks to build a secular national identity.
The United Nations has condemned the Taliban after the ultraconservative administration publicly flogged more than 60 people, including more than a dozen women, in the northern Afghanistani province of Sari Pul.
The Supreme Leader of the Taliban has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he announced the fight against Western democracy will continue, further marking the Taliban’s quick return to harsh punishments in public after an American-led withdrawal of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban's subsequent return to power following the departure.
For the first time since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces in 2021, the Islamic fundamentalist group officially confirmed that they have arrested women in the country’s capital, Kabul, for wearing “bad hijab.”
Afghanistan has seen a rising surge of women taking their own lives or trying to do so since the Taliban took over the country in 2021 and made attempts to reduce women’s role in public life, showing desperation among Afghan women to escape a regime that constantly deprives them of rights and freedoms.
A spokesperson for a key ministry in Afghanistan’s Taliban government declared on August 17th that Afghan women would lose their value if men could see their faces uncovered in public. He also claimed that many religious scholars agree that women should cover their faces when outside their homes.
Since the Taliban seized power as a US-led coalition of foreign military forces left Afghanistan in August 2021, they imposed wide-sweeping restrictions against women based on their strict interpretation of Islam and Sharia law.
The transition from insurgency to governance was never easy for the Taliban when it seized power in Afghanistan after a coalition of foreign forces led by the United States fled in 2021.
Some of the Taliban’s fighters were so used to jihad and fighting they reportedly felt bored when they had to switch their weapons to paperwork. In an Afghan valley that raised some of the organization’s best and most ardent fighters, some regret that they haven’t fulfilled their duties as suicide bombers for the Taliban.
