The Taliban has banned women in Afghanistan from allowing their voices to be heard by other women, further intensifying its repressive policies against Afghan women’s rights and raising concerns among human rights activists that such new laws could isolate them even further, preventing them from engaging in conversation or forming support networks.
The Taliban announced on October 14th that they would implement a new law that would ban news media and journalists in Afghanistan from taking and publishing any image of all living beings.
A group of British Islamist journalists working for a popular Muslim news website expressed their admiration for the Taliban during a podcast episode where they marked the third anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces from the country.
The United Nations and various human rights groups and activists strongly condemned a new measure by the Taliban regime to further suppress women’s rights in Afghanistan after it introduced a new, draconian law forbidding women from showing their faces or even speaking when outside of their homes.
A shocking new research on the prevalence of violence against women in Afghanistan reveals that the cases of more than 300 women being killed by men since the Taliban took over in 2021 following the withdrawal of the US-led military coalition from the country are just the “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the true scale of gender-based violence in Afghanistan.
Beauty salons, which once provided Afghan women with safe space following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 after American-led coalition forces pulled out of the country, were outlawed since 2023, forcing many beauticians and their clients underground.
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.
