KABUL — The Taliban authorities decreed Saturday that Afghan ladies should cowl themselves from head to toe, increasing a collection of onerous restrictions on ladies that dictate almost each facet of public life.
The federal government’s Ministry for the Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice urged the burqa as the popular garment for overlaying a girl’s face, hair and physique. But it surely didn’t mandate sporting the garment so long as ladies in any other case cowl themselves with a hijab.
The total-body burqa, lengthy emblematic of patriarchal management of ladies’s public apparel in Afghanistan, was described by the ministry as “the great and full hijab” — a garment with numerous variations that cowl a girl’s hair and far or all of her face and physique.
Because the Taliban seized management of Afghanistan in August, Afghan ladies have been subjected to a cascade of bulletins limiting their employment, training, journey, deportment and different points of public life. Many had assumed that the return of a burqa-style physique overlaying was the inevitable subsequent step.
The burqa, which leaves solely a girl’s palms and ft seen and features a stitched facial netting for imaginative and prescient, was required by the Taliban when it dominated most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
The ministry’s definition of “hijab” Saturday described a garment that “shouldn’t be too quick or too tight,” the ministry announcement mentioned. The intent was to obscure the outlines of a girl’s physique, the ministry mentioned.
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan sharply criticized the decree and mentioned it could create new strains within the militant group’s efforts to realize worldwide recognition because the nation’s respectable authorities.
In a press release posted on its web site, the mission mentioned the decree “contradicts quite a few assurances relating to respect for and safety of all Afghans’ human rights, together with these of ladies and women, that had been supplied to the worldwide group by Taliban representatives throughout discussions and negotiations over the previous decade.”
In public bulletins relating to ladies in latest months, the federal government has usually delivered vaguely worded proclamations left open to interpretation. Cautious of Western condemnation because the Taliban authorities seeks diplomatic recognition and humanitarian assist, many bulletins have appeared to depend on inference and intimidation.
However the ministry, which is answerable for imposing the federal government’s interpretation of Islamic regulation, was fairly particular Saturday about punishments for the male head of household of ladies who fail to stick to the newest decree.
Reporting From Afghanistan
At a three-hour information convention dominated by pronouncements selling the spiritual virtues of the burqa, ministry officers and Islamic spiritual figures dictated a collection of escalating punishments — together with jail time for male household heads who repeatedly disregarded warnings from authorities officers relating to ladies’s apparel.
If a girl did not put on the prescribed hijab in public, ministry officers would go to her house and advise the male head of the household to require her to conform, the ministry announcement mentioned.
Failure to conform would lead to a summons to the ministry, the officers mentioned. If the person nonetheless did not observe the rules, he can be jailed for 3 days.
If the jail sentence didn’t compel adherence, the person can be compelled to look earlier than a non secular court docket for additional punishment, ministry officers mentioned.
Male authorities workers whose wives or daughters fail to cowl themselves in public can be topic to suspension or dismissal, the announcement mentioned. And the comparatively few ladies nonetheless permitted to carry jobs — akin to nurses, docs and academics — might be fired if they didn’t adjust to the rules.
“We would like our sisters to stay with dignity and security,” mentioned Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the appearing vice and advantage minister.
Shir Mohammad, a vice and advantage official, mentioned in a press release that “all dignified Afghan ladies” ought to cowl themselves from head to toe. “These ladies who should not too outdated or too younger should cowl their face, besides the eyes,” he added.
Because the Taliban takeover in August, extra ladies in Kabul seem to have begun sporting burqas. However the majority of ladies on the streets of the capital have continued to put on much less encompassing variations of hijabs, with many overlaying solely their hair and leaving most or all of their faces nonetheless seen.
Even below the earlier, Western-backed authorities, many ladies — particularly in rural areas and small cities — continued to put on burqas. The historical past of the garment dates again generations in Afghanistan, and is a product of conservative Afghan tradition that lengthy preceded the emergence of the Taliban within the Nineteen Nineties.
At Saturday’s information convention, spiritual audio system delivered dissertations on the Islamic historical past of the hijab and its advantages in response to Islamic regulation and apply.
The ministry instructed officers throughout Afghanistan to place up posters in bazaars and different public places with directions and pictures of accredited clothes for ladies. In latest months, small posters have appeared in Kabul depicting head-to-toe hijabs, together with burqas, as correct public apparel for ladies.
On Saturday, ministry officers mentioned the “ruling, significance and advantages of the hijab” must be mentioned in mosques and distributed by way of the information media.
In September, the Taliban transformed the earlier authorities’s Ministry of Ladies’s Affairs to the workplace for the Vice and Advantage ministry. Underneath the Taliban authorities of the Nineteen Nineties, ladies who did not put on a burqa in public have been usually crushed by vice and advantage spiritual police, who additionally delivered warnings to male kinfolk.
Additionally Saturday, a spokesman for an Afghan opposition group that has mounted an insurgency towards the Taliban authorities repeated earlier claims that it had “liberated” three districts within the northern province of Panjshir. Requested whether or not the Nationwide Resistance Entrance, because the motion calls itself, had seized authorities district facilities, the spokesman replied by textual content message, “They have been besieged within the district places of work,” referring to Taliban officers.
The Taliban authorities spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, mentioned on Twitter that “no army incident has taken place” in Panjshir or another close by areas. Nationwide Resistance Entrance claims “weren’t true, nobody must be nervous,” Mr. Mujahid wrote.
He added that 1000’s of Islamic Emirate fighters have been in Panjshir and stopping any army advances by the entrance.
The Nationwide Resistance Entrance, or N.R.F., was shaped by a number of leaders or supporters of Afghanistan’s Western-backed authorities earlier than it collapsed final summer time. It’s a part of a resistance that consists of a smattering of armed fighters unfold throughout the mountains of northern Afghanistan, in response to interviews with greater than a dozen resistance fighters and leaders.
The N.R.F. has an estimated a number of hundred fighters, a lot of them low-ranking officers within the former authorities’s safety forces. It’s led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of the deceased Northern Alliance chief Ahmad Shah Massoud. Mr. Massoud left Afghanistan after the Taliban seized energy and has directed the N.R.F. from overseas.
Yaqoob Akbary and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.
Supply: NY Times